LEON3 ViP: A Virtual Platform with Fault Injection Capabilities

In addition to functional simulation for validation of hardware/software designs, there are additional robustness requirements that need advanced simulation techniques and tools to analyze the system behavior in the presence of faults. In this paper, we present the design of a fault injection framework for LEON3, a 32bit SPARC CPU based system used by the European Space Agency, described at Transaction Level using System C. First of all an extension of a previous XML formalization of basic binary faults, like memory and CPU registers corruption, is done in order to support TLM2.0transaction’s parameters corruptions. Next a novel Dynamic Binary Instrumentation (DBI) technique for C++ binaries is used to insert fault injection wrappers in SystemC transaction path. For binary faults in model components the use ofTLM2.0 “transport_dbg” is proposed. This way each component with fault injection capabilities exposes a standard interface to allow internal component inspection and modification.