Speeding up safety verification by fault abstraction and simulation to transaction level

The need for safer and more robust hardware systems increased considerably in the automotive industry after the introduction of the safety standard ISO 26262. As a result, fault injection became a major verification milestone for safety-critical applications. However, safety-verification methods for gate level (GL) and RTL models suffer from long simulation time and large fault-injection campaigns due to the high complexity of large-scale SoCs. Virtual prototypes (VP) were employed to address the shortcomings of GL and RTL simulation, however fault injection into VPs usually leads to the observation of different failures than into GL and RTL models. In this paper, we present an approach which ensures 100% correlation of faults injected across VPs and GL models. Using a compiled-code approach, we transform GL net-lists into C++ code, which we then integrate into SystemC/TLM-based VPs. Thus, the new VPs have the same accuracy as the GL net-lists and are executed at near VP speed. Furthermore, since the new models share all fault-injection properties with the original GL net-lists, only realistic failures can be observed after fault injection.

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