NETFI-2: An Automatic Method for Fault Injection on HDL-Based Designs

International audienceFault injection tools, which include fault simulation and emulation, are a well-known technique to evaluate the susceptibility of integrated circuits to the effects of radiation. This work presents a methodology to emulate Single Event Upsets (SEUs) and Single Event Transients (SETs) in a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). The method proposed combines the flexibility of FPGA with the controllability provided by the MicroBlaze, to emulate HDL circuit and control the fault injection campaign. This approach has been integrated into a fault-injection platform, named NETFI (NETlist Fault Injection), developed by our research group, and received the name of NETFI-2. To validate this methodology fault injection campaign have been performed in Leon3 and Stochastic Bayesian Machine. Results on an Artix-7 FPGA show that NETFI-2 provides accurate measurements while improving the execution time of the experiment by more than 300% compared with analogous simulation-based campaigns