Injecting intermittent faults for the dependability validation of commercial microcontrollers

It is expected that intermittent faults will be a great challenge in modern VLSI circuits. In this work, we present a case study of the effects of intermittent faults on the behavior of a commercial microcontroller. The methodology used lies in VHDL-based fault injection technique, which allows a systematic and exhaustive analysis of the influence of different fault and system parameters. From the simulation traces, the occurrences of failures and latent errors have been logged. To extend the study, the results obtained have been compared to those got when injecting transient and permanent faults. The applied methodology can be generalized to more complex systems.