EXFI: a low-cost fault injection system for embedded microprocessor-based boards

ABSTRACT

Evaluating the faulty behavior of low-cost embedded microprocessor-based boards is an increasingly important issue, due to their adoption in many safety critical systems. The architecture of a complete Fault Injection environment is proposed, integrating a module for generating a collapsed list of faults, and another for performing their injection and gathering the results. To address this issue, the paper describes a software-implemented Fault Injection approach based on the Trace Exception Mode available in most microprocessors. The authors describe EXFI, a prototypical system implementing the approach, and provide data about some sample benchmark applications. The main advantages of EXFI are the low cost, the good portability, and the high efficiency

REFERENCES

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  B. Hardware
  B.8 Performance and Reliability

Additional Classification:
  B. Hardware
  B.8 Performance and Reliability

General Terms:
Design, Experimentation, Measurement

Keywords:
fault coverage, fault injection, microprocessor systems, software-implemented fault injection, trace exception mode