Injecting Intermittent Faults for the Dependability Assessment of a Fault-Tolerant Microcomputer System

Gil-Tomás, Daniel; Gracia-Morán, Joaquín; Calvo, Juan Carlos; Saiz-Adalid, Luis-J.; Gil-Vicente, Pedro-J.

doi:10.1109/tr.2015.2484058

Cited by 11 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 27 publications

(44 reference statements)

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“…Intermittent faults may manifest as multiple bit-flips or exhibit a behaviour similar to permanent faults under specific operating conditions [9]. In the presence of a fault, the circuit may produce enough errors that the online signal probability at the output falls outside the signature window w (lower than W min or higher than W max ).…”

Section: Motivationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The evaluation of this technique was performed for errors induced by stuck-at faults and multiple bit-flips, as these error models produce a behaviour similar to that of long duration intermittent faults occurring in-the-field [8], [9]. Unbiased workloads of different sizes of uncorrelated random patterns were applied during simulations.…”

Section: A Error Coverage Simulationmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Low cost error monitoring for improved maintainability of IoT applications

Gutierrez

Tenentes

Kázmierski

et al. 2017

2017 IEEE International Symposium on Defect and Fault Tolerance in VLSI and Nanotechnology Systems (DFT)

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Abstract-Electronic systems with power-constrained embedded devices are used for a variety of IoT applications, such as geomonitoring, parking sensors and surveillance. Such applications may tolerate few errors. However, with the increasing occurrence of faults in-the-field, devices that exhibit systematic erroneous behaviour must be eventually identified and replaced. In this paper, we propose a novel low cost error monitoring technique to assist the maintainability planning of low power IoT applications by ranking devices based on the systematic erroneous behaviour they exhibit. Small on-chip monitors are used to collect the signal probability information at the outputs of each device which is then transmitted to the system software via the communications channel of the system to rank them accordingly. To evaluate the error monitoring capabilities of the proposed technique, we injected multiple bit-flips and stuck-at faults on a set of the EPFL and the ISCAS benchmarks. Results demonstrate an average error coverage of 84.4% and 73.1% of errors induced by bit-flips and stuck-at faults, respectively, with an average area cost of 1.52%. A maintainability planning simulation shows that the proposed technique achieves a reduction of 26x to 263x in area cost and static power, and consumes over 625x less power for communications when compared against duplication and comparison.

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Section: Motivationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: A Error Coverage Simulationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Low cost error monitoring for improved maintainability of IoT applications

Gutierrez

Tenentes

Kázmierski

et al. 2017

2017 IEEE International Symposium on Defect and Fault Tolerance in VLSI and Nanotechnology Systems (DFT)

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“…The behavioral model is provided by the software, and the user can extend the model or use models built by the software. Gil-Tomás et al [14] designed an SFI to inject intermittent faults to evaluate the dependability in submicron complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technologies. A wide set of intermittent faults was injected, and from the simu-lation traces, coverages and latencies were measured.…”

Section: Introduction and Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Realistic Simulation of Sensor/Actuator Faults for a Dependability Evaluation of Demand-Controlled Ventilation and Heating Systems

2022

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In the development of fault-tolerant systems, simulation is a common technique used to obtain insights into performance and dependability because it saves time and avoids the risks of testing the behavior of real-world systems in the presence of faults. Fault injection in a simulation offers a high controllability and observability, and thus is ideal for an early dependability analysis and fault-tolerance evaluation. Heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems in critical infrastructures, such as airports and hospitals, are safety-relevant systems, which not only determine energy consumption, system efficiency, and occupancy comfort but also play an essential role in emergency scenarios (e.g., fires, biological hazards). Hence, fault injection serves as a practical and essential solution to assess dependability in different fault scenarios of HVAC systems. Hence, in this paper, we present a simulation-based fault injection framework with a combination of two techniques, simulator command and simulation code modification, which are applied to fault injector blocks as saboteurs and an automated fault injector algorithm to automatically activate fault cases with certain fault attributes. The proposed fault injection framework supports a comprehensive range of faults and various fault attributes, including fault persistence, fault type, fault location, fault duration, and fault interarrival time. This framework considers noise in a demand-controlled ventilation (DCV) and heating system as a type of HVAC system since it has been demonstrated that any fault injection scenario is accompanied by some impacts on energy consumption, occupancy comfort, and a fire risk. It also supports the reproducibility for a set of specific fault scenarios or random fault injection scenarios. The system model was implemented and simulated in Matlab/Simulink, and fault injector blocks were developed by Stateflow diagrams. An experimental evaluation serves as the assessment of the presented fault injection framework with a defined example of fault scenarios. The results of the evaluation show the correctness, system behavior, accuracy, and other parameters of the system, such as the heater energy consumption and heater duty cycle of the fault injection framework in the presence of different fault cases. In conclusion, the present paper provides a novel simulation-based fault injection framework, which combines simulator command techniques and simulation code modifications for a realistic and automatic fault injection with comprehensive coverage of various fault types and a consideration of noise and uncertainty, allowing for reproducibility of the results. The outputs achieved from the fault injection framework can be applied to fault-tolerant studies in other application domains.

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“…The technique of the so-called saboteur [Gil15] has been used for fault injection. It means a module referred to as saboteur is placed in every interconnection which was selected for IRF injection.…”

Section: Intermittent Resistive Fault Generationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The tool receives the procedure of random IRF generation via a TCL file. The technique of the so-called saboteur [Gil15] was utilised for the fault injection. It means a VHDL component referred to as saboteur is defined for IRF injection.…”

Section: Simulation Setupmentioning

confidence: 99%

Design and verification of embedded instruments for detecting intermittent resistive faults in electronic systems

Ebrahimi¹

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Injecting Intermittent Faults for the Dependability Assessment of a Fault-Tolerant Microcomputer System

Cited by 11 publications

References 27 publications

Low cost error monitoring for improved maintainability of IoT applications

Low cost error monitoring for improved maintainability of IoT applications

Realistic Simulation of Sensor/Actuator Faults for a Dependability Evaluation of Demand-Controlled Ventilation and Heating Systems

Design and verification of embedded instruments for detecting intermittent resistive faults in electronic systems

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