Study, comparison and application of different VHDL-based fault injection techniques for the experimental validation of a fault-tolerant system

In this work different VHDL-based fault injection techniques (simulator commands, saboteurs and mutants) have been compared and applied in the validation of a fault-tolerant system. Some extensions and implementation designs of these techniques have been introduced. As a complement of these injection techniques, a wide set of fault models (including several non-usual models) have been implemented. We have injected both transient and permanent faults on the system model, using two different workloads, with the help of a fault injection tool that we have developed. We have studied the pathology of the propagated errors, measured their latencies, and calculated both detection and recovery coverages. Results show that coverages for transient faults can be obtained quite accurately with any of the three techniques. This enables the use of different abstraction level models for the same system. We have also verified significant differences in implementation and simulation cost between the studied injection techniques. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.