Advanced Speeding-up Techniques for SEU Sensitivity Assessment

Today's integrated circuits are increasingly subject to the effects of radiation. To assess the reliability of a digital system and to identify the most critical failure effects, radiation-based experimentation or fault injection campaigns are usually performed, which may be costly and time-expensive. This paper proposes enhancements to current widely employed fault injection techniques, aimed at accelerating the process and lowering the costs of the flow. The employed principles and a new fully automatic fault injection flow are presented. Experimental case studies based on available microprocessor systems demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed solutions.