Design and characterization of a high-safety hardware/software module for the acquisition of Eurobalise telegrams

This paper describes the design and characterization of a safety critical module for Eurobalise railway signalling. The design of the module is done on a HW/SW platform to include compliance to the safety regulations both at HW and SW level. The safety of the obtained design implemented on FPGA is then characterized through a fault injection campaign. The fault injection campaign isolated some corner cases suggesting optimization of the design. The novelty of our work is the use of fault injection on FPGA based platforms to characterize and optimize the design flow of a safety critical system thus adding an extra layer of ex-post characterization of designs implemented in compliance to safety-driven standards.