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A Fault Injection System for Measuring Soft Processor Design Sensitivity on Virtex-5 FPGAs

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Abstract

This paper presents an FPGA fault injection system, a methodology for soft processor fault injection, and fault injection experimental results for MicroBlaze and LEON3 soft processor designs. The Xilinx Radiation Test Consortium—Virtex 5 Fault Injector (XRTC-V5FI) was built to evaluate the configuration memory sensitivity of soft processor designs. To overcome some of the challenges of soft processor fault injection, we designed the XRTC-V5FI to be fast, flexible, and to fully cover all configuration memory bits. The minimum time to inject a full bitstream is 28 minutes and the individual fault injection can be as fast as 49 μS. The LEON3 has 81.3 % more sensitive bits than the MicroBlaze, yet when normalized by the number of used slices, the MicroBlaze is 26.2 % more sensitive than the LEON3.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the I/UCRC Program of the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1265957. We also acknowledge the Xilinx Radiation Test Consortium (XRTC) and members for support and use of XRTC test hardware.

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Correspondence to Nathan A. Harward .

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Harward, N.A., Gardiner, M.R., Hsiao, L.W., Wirthlin, M.J. (2016). A Fault Injection System for Measuring Soft Processor Design Sensitivity on Virtex-5 FPGAs. In: Kastensmidt, F., Rech, P. (eds) FPGAs and Parallel Architectures for Aerospace Applications. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-14352-1_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-14352-1_5

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-14351-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-14352-1

  • eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)

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