SCEMIT: A SystemC error and mutation injection tool

As high-level models in C and SystemC are increasingly used for verification and even design (through high-level synthesis) of electronic systems, there is a growing need for compatible error injection tools to facilitate further development of coverage metrics and automated diagnosis. This paper introduces SCEMIT, a tool for the automated injection of errors into C/C++/SystemC models. A selection of `mutation' style errors are supported, and injection is performed though a plugin interface in the GCC compiler, which minimizes the impact of SCEMIT on existing simulation flows. Experimental injected error detection results are presented for the set of OSCI SystemC Example Models as well as the CHStone C High-Level-Synthesis benchmark set. Aside from demonstrating compatibility with these models, the results show the value of high-level error injection as a coverage measure compared to conventional code coverage measures.