Dependability analysis: performance evaluation of environment configurations

Prototyping-based fault injection environments are employed to perform dependability analysis and thus predict the behavior of circuits in presence of faults. A novel environment has been recently proposed to perform several types of dependability analyses in a common optimized framework. The approach takes advantage of hardware speed and of software flexibility to achieve optimized trade-offs between experiment duration and processing complexity. This paper discusses the possible repartition of tasks between hardware and embedded software with respect to the type of circuit to analyze and to the instrumentation achieved. The performances of the approach are evaluated for each configuration of the environment