A Functional Verification based Fault Injection Environment

Fault injection is needed for different purposes such as analyzing the reaction of a system in a faulty environment or validating fault-detection and/or fault-correction techniques. In this paper we propose a simulation-based fault injection tool able to work at different abstraction levels and with user-defined fault models. By exploiting the facilities provided by a functional verification environment it allows to speed up the entire fault injection process: from the creation of the workload to the analysis of the results of injection campaigns. Moreover, the adoption of techniques to optimize the fault list significantly reduces the simulation time. Being the tool targeted to the validation of dependable systems, it includes a way to extract information from the Failure Mode and Effect Analysis and to correlate fault injection results with estimates.