A Transparent and Non-intrusive Fault Injector for FPGA-based SoC

TOMATIS, NICOLÁS; VOLARIK, MARIANO; FRAIRE, JUAN

Bariloche

Conferencia; International School on the Effects of Radiation on Embedded Systems for Space Applications (SERESSA); 2014

Comisión Nacional de Energía Atómica

The harshness of the space environment poses severe challenges to satellite design and development as traditional electronic circuits might be sensitive to the effects of radiation. In particular, if the impact of a radiation particle hits a memory cell, it might change it stored value provoking a Single Event Upset (SEU). Since SEUs can be catastrophic under certain circumstances, reliability must be assessed in advance. Furthermore, there seem to be no community agreement on the implications of the ever increasing integration level of modern integrated circuits. In this context, System on a Chip (SoC) are emerging as an appealing yet complex solution for space applications as processors, memories, peripheral, among others coexist in a single die. As a result, reliability analysis of SoCs require significant effort and care since they might exhibit unexpected failure modes. Among others techniques, fault injection allows for the analysis and study of the effects of potential SEU on the SoC. In this work we introduce TRAFIC (Transparent and Non-intrusive Fault Injector), a fault injection mechanism for a LEON3 GPL SoC based on the OCD (On-Chip Debug) interface. Finally, we present a preliminary reliability result of a benchmarking application embedded in this popular SoC.