A FPGA-Based Demonstrator for Safety-Critical Applications

Abstract

This work presents a demonstrator for safety-critical applications based on a low-cost FPGA platform. The main goal of the demonstrator is to show the features and benefits of a fault-injection tool for FPGAs called FIJI (Fault Injection Instrumenter) that was developed by the authors of this paper. Besides, the demonstrator should illustrate typical sources of hardware/software faults as well as approaches and methods for fault-tolerant design that are commonly applied to modern electronic based systems. Both details of the demonstrator's design as well as implementation results including the overhead on resources caused by the proposed fault-injection logic are presented. The demonstrator is portable to FPGA families of different FPGA vendors and can be implemented by using freeware/open-source design tools. Finally, it is planned that all design data of the demonstrator (including source code and documentation) will be available under an open-source license.