Simulation Fault Injection Experimental Results

Abstract

As mentioned in the previous Chapters, fault injection campaigns can be performed in different levels. The fault injection by simulation is performed by adding upsets when simulating a given system in commercial simulators, such as ModelSim from Mentor or iSim from Xilinx, or open source simulators, such as Spice. They are able to provide the best control over the experiment. This characteristic is because the simulation can be stopped at any simulation time and the internal values from anywhere inside the system can be read and stored for post-analysis. As a consequence, the amount of data is the biggest among the different levels of available fault injection campaigns types.

As a drawback, fault injection by simulation requires considerable computational power and simulation time, since huge amounts of data must be processed, relative to the size of the circuit and its complexity. As an example, the injection of 100,000 faults in the miniMIPS may take up to a few days to finish, depending on the simulator and the application running on the processor.