Reconfigurable embedded devices built on SRAM-based Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) are being increasingly used in critical embedded applications. However, the susceptibility of such memory cells to Single Event Upsets (SEU) requires the use of fault tolerant designs, for which fault injection is still the most accepted verification technique. This paper describes FIRED, a fault injector targeted at SRAM-based FPGAs for dependability evaluation of critical systems. This tool is able to perform hardware fault injection in real-time, by inserting bitflips at the SRAM cells through partial dynamic reconfiguration. These faults may produce errors in the design of the VHDL or Verilog modules deployed in the FPGA. A case study of a fault injection campaign in a PID-based cruise control system is used to evaluate the capabilities of FIRED, namely its capacity of injecting faults while a physical application is being controlled.
Keywords
dependability, fault injection, embedded systems, FPGA, SEU
Subject
An FPGA fault-injector
Related Project
CECRIS – CErtification of CRItical Systems
Conference
The 21st IEEE Pacific Rim International Symposium on Dependable Computing (PRDC 2015), November 2015
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Cited by
Year 2019 : 1 citations
Fuchs, C.M., Fault-tolerant satellite computing with modern semiconductors, PhD Thesis, Faculty of Science. Leiden University, 2019-12-17, isbn:9789402817669, http://hdl.handle.net/1887/82454
Year 2018 : 1 citations
Igor Villalta, Unai Bidarte, Julen Gómez-Cornejo, Jaime Jiménez, Jesús Lázaro, SEU emulation in industrial SoCs combining microprocessor and FPGA, Reliability Engineering & System Safety, Volume 170, 2018, Pages 53-63
Year 2017 : 2 citations
Tingting Yu, Lei Chen, Xuewu Li, Shuo Wang, and Jing Zhou, "Critical-Bitstream-Based SEU Injection and Validation for Xilinx SRAM-Based FPGAs," International Journal of Electrical Energy, Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 29-33, June 2017. doi: 10.18178/ijoee.5.1.29-33
Yu, Tingting, et al. "Analyzing the Single Event Upset Sensitivity of Digital Clock Manager in Virtex-5 FPGA." Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Informatics, Environment, Energy and Applications. ACM, 2017.
