Radiation tolerance testing using software simulation

Radiation tolerance can be achieved by triplicating all the circuits and using majority voting, triple module redundancy (TMR), to remove faults caused by radiation. This approach, applied blindly, requires at least a 3× increase in hardware and power consumption. In this paper we introduce an automated low cost software platform for efficiently performing fault injection experiments targeting single event upsets in programmable devices. This platform allows designers to start analyzing and testing for SEU during the design phase. Faults are injected by modifying internal signals during simulation. In this approach we verify that software simulation is a valid tool to study critical points of a design that may impair system dependability.