Power And Fault Emulation for Software Verification and System Stability Testing in Safety Critical Environments

In recent years the complexity of digital control systems in safety critical environments increased steadily from simple discrete control units to complex embedded systems. A wide industrial consensus about the necessity of a set of safety definitions lead to the introduction of several functional safety standards like IEC61508. To achieve that novel embedded systems comply with these requirements, thorough testing is needed during early design stages of the integrated device. Currently only fault injection testing using manufactured products and netlists of system-on-chips are used to determine the fault resistance of the embedded system. This late testing could result in expensive redesigns and hide implementation errors because of the black-box approach. This approach is also not practicable if software and hardware providers are separate entities. This paper presents a flexible fault injection and power estimation platform to enable thorough examinations of novel complex system-on-chips for automotive or similar critical environments. The microprocessor evaluation approach is extended with smart bus fault emulation units for common buses like Ethernet. The combined power and fault emulation techniques allow for the instant exploration of eventual power supply peaks and implementation weaknesses.