Simulated Fault Injection Using Simulator Modification Technique

In the current very deep submicron technology era, fault tolerant mechanisms perform an essential function to cope with the effects of soft errors. To evaluate the effectiveness of the fault tolerant mechanism, reliability engineers use simulated fault injections using either saboteur modules or mutants in the simulation model. However, the two methods suffer from both inefficiency in the simulation mechanism and difficulties with the experimental setups. To overcome these inefficiencies, we propose the Verilog-based simulated fault injection (VFI) technique. VFI has the following advantages. First, modification of the design model is unnecessary. Second, the fault injection simulation procedure is simple and efficient. Third, various types of fault injection experiments can be performed. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology, we developed a VFI environment using the ICARUS Verilog Simulator. From the experimental results, we were able to qualitatively evaluate the reliability of the target simulation models and to assess the effectiveness of the employed fault-tolerance mechanisms.