Fault grouping for fault injection based simulation of AMS circuits in the context of functional safety

The fault injection technique is utilized for simulation-based verification of safety-related analog and mixed-signal (AMS) circuits for compliance with safety requirements in the presence of hardware faults. Exhaustive fault simulation is very time consuming with respect to the number of faults to simulate at circuit level. For efficient simulation-based verification, a fault grouping approach is proposed to reduce the number of faults to simulate without missing out potentially safety-critical faults. The fault grouping approach is based on component-level fault simulation, hierarchical clustering and internal cluster validation. The effectiveness is investigated on a component extracted from an automotive safety-related System on a Chip.