Towards Certification-aware Fault Injection Methodologies Using Virtual Prototypes

Abstract

Safety-critical applications are required today to meet more and more stringent standards than ever. In the need of reducing the costs associated with the certification step, early robustness evaluation can provide valuable information, as long as it is fast and accurate enough. Microarchitectural simulators have been employed for testing reliability properties in several domains in the past, but their use in the process of robustness verification of safety critical systems has not been validated yet, as opposed to RTL or gate-level simulations. In the present work, we propose a methodology to improve the accuracy of faultinjection results when targeting robustness verification, by using microarchitectural simulators and virtual prototypes for an early estimation of deviations with respect to the certification standards.