Flodam: Cross-Layer Reliability Analysis Flow for Complex Hardware Designs

Abstract

Modern technologies make hardware designs more and more sensitive to radiation particles and related faults. As a result, analysing the behavior of a system under radiation-induced faults has become an essential part of the system design process. Existing approaches either focus on analysing the radiation impact at the lower hardware design layers, without further propagating any radiation-induced fault to the system execution, or analyse system reliability at higher hardware or application layers, based on fault models that are agnostic of the fabrication technology and the radiation environment. Flodam combines the benefits of existing approaches by providing a novel cross-layer reliability analysis from the semiconductor layer up to the application layer, able to quantify the risks of faults under a given context, taking into account the environmental conditions, the physical hardware design and the application under study.