Searching Representative and Low Cost Fault Models for Intermittent Faults in Microcontrollers: A Case Study

Intermittent faults are expected to be a great challenge in VLSI circuits. The complexity of manufacturing processes, provoking residues and process variations, and special wear out mechanisms, may increase the presence of such faults. This work presents a case study of the effects of intermittent faults on the behavior of a commercial micro controller. By using VHDL-based fault injection, particularly saboteurs, we have injected different intermittent fault models in the micro controller buses, as they are critical locations, potentially sensitive to intermittent faults. We have compared the impact and the feasibility of implementation of the fault models, in order to select a representative and low cost intermittent fault load. The applied methodology can be generalized to inject intermittent faults in other locations, such as registers and memory, and to validate the dependability of critical systems.