A fast and accurate hybrid fault injection platform for transient and permanent faults

Many ground-level and space systems require reliability testing before their deployment, since they are increasingly susceptible to transient and permanent faults. Such process must be accurate, controllable, generic, cheap, and fast. Even though fault injection at gate-level is often the most appropriate solution when one seeks for accuracy and controllability, it is very time-consuming. Considering that, this work proposes a hybrid fault injection framework that automatically switches between RTL and gate-level simulation modes. By using a complex 8-issue VLIW processor as case-study, we show that the injection process can be accelerated by more than $$10\times $$ for transient faults and almost 2 times for permanent faults over conventional injectors, while maintaining gate-level accuracy and controllability. The proposed framework is generic, so that faults can be injected into any arbitrary circuit, which is demonstrated by also injecting faults in a neural network and achieving a speedup of more than $$30\times $$ .