A non-intrusive portable fault injection framework to assess reliability of FPGA-based designs

Abstract

This paper proposes a full-featured fault injection framework to assess reliability of FPGA-based designs. The framework provides non-intrusiveness, portability, flexibility and performance in reliability evaluation of FPGA-based designs against adverse effects of SEUs. It works in a non-intrusive manner, allowing the reliability of ready-to-be-released designs to be assessed independently, without any intrusion into their place and route characteristics. We have studied implications of framework's intrusiveness into design under test by comparing proposed non-intrusive framework with previous intrusive methods; up to 5% deviation in the number of effective faults is observed in intrusive methods. Providing portability, the framework can be applied for a wide variety of FPGAs. Allowing the user to define desired parameters for different fault injection strategies confirms framework's flexibility. Finally, the framework performs the process of injecting faults, evaluating design and removing faults in about 17ms, on average.