Fault Injection Techniques and Tools for Embedded Systems Reliability Evaluation

ISBN-13: 9781402075896 / Angielski / Twarda / 2003 / 241 str.

Alfredo Benso; Paolo Prinetto; P. Prinetto

Opis

Our society is faced with an increasing dependence on computing systems, not only in high tech consumer applications but also in areas (e.g., air and railway traffic control, nuclear plant control, aircraft and car control) where a failure can be critical for the safety of human beings. Unfortunately, it is accepted that large digital systems cannot be fault-free. Some faults may be attributed to inaccuracy during the development, while others can come from external causes such as environmental stress. Radiations, electromagnetic interference and power glitches are some of the most common causes of transient faults.
As a consequence, the past years have seen a growing interest in methods for studying the behaviour of computer-based systems when faults occur, and several approaches have been proposed to evaluate the dependability properties of a computer-based system.
Fault Injection, i.e., the artificial injection of faults into a computer system in order to study its behaviour, emerged as a viable solution, and has been deeply investigated by both academia and industry. Different techniques have been proposed and some of them practically experimented.
Fault Injection Techniques and Tools for Embedded Systems Reliability Evaluation intends to be a comprehensive guide to Fault Injection techniques used to evaluate the dependability of a digital system. The description and the critical analysis of different Fault Injection techniques and tools will be authored by key scientists in the field of system dependability and fault tolerance.

Spis treści

Contributing Authors. Preface. Acknowledgements. 1: A First Look at Fault Injection. 1.1: Fault Injection Techniques. 1. Introduction. 2. An Overview of Fault Injection. 3. Hardware-based Fault Injection. 4. Software-based Fault Injection. 5. Simulation-based Fault Injection. 6. Hybrid Fault Injection. 7. Objectives of Fault Injection. 8. Further Researches. 1.2: Dependability Evaluation Methods. 1. Types of Dependability Evaluation Methods. 2. Dependability Evaluation by Analysis. 3. Dependability Evaluation by Field Experience. 4. Dependability Evaluation by Fault Injection Testing. 5. Conclusion and Outlook. 1.3: Soft Errors on Digital Components. 1. Introduction. 2. Soft Errors. 3. Protection against Soft Errors. 4. Other Sources of Soft Errors. 2: Hardware-Implemented Fault Injection. 2.1: Pin-Level Hardware Fault Injection Techniques. 1. Introduction. 2. State of the Art. 3. The Pin Level FI FARM Model. 4. Description of the Fault Injection Tool. 5. Critical Analysis. 2.2: Development of a Hybrid Fault Injection Environment. 1. Dependability Testing and Evaluation of Railway Control Systems. 2. Birth of a Validation Environment. 3. The Evolution of LIVE. 4. Example Application. 5. Conclusions. 2.3: Heavy Ion Induced SEE in SRAM Based FPGAs. 1. Introduction. 2. Experimental Set Up. 3. SEEs in FPGAs. 4. Conclusions. 3: Software-Implemented Fault Injection. 3.1: BOND: an Agents-Based Fault Injector for Windows NT. 1. The Target Platform. 2. Interposition Agents and Fault Injection. 3. The BOND Tool. 4. The Fault Injection Agent. 5. Experimental Evaluation of BOND. 6. Conclusions. 3.2: Xception™: a Software Implemented Fault Injection Tool. 1. Introduction. 2. The Xception Technique. 3. The Xception Toolset. 4. Critical Analysis. 3.3: MAFALDA: A Series of Prototype Tools for the Assessment of Real Time Cots Microkernel-Based Systems. 1. Introduction. 2. Overall Structure of MALFADA-RT. 3. Fault Injection. 4. Workload and Activation. 5. Readouts and Measures. 6. Lessons Learnt and Perspectives. 4: Simulation-Based Fault Injection. 4.1: VHDL Simulation-Based Fault Injection Techniques. 1. Introduction. 2. VHDL Simulation-Based Fault Injection. 3. Fault Models. 4. Description of VFIT. 5. Experiments of Fault Injection: Validation of a Fault Tolerant Microcomputer System. 6. Conclusions. 4.2: MEFISTO: A Series of Prototype Tools for Fault Injection into VHDL Models. 1. Introduction. 2. MEFISTO-L. 3. MEFISTO-C. 4. Some Lessons Learnt and Perspectives. 4.3: Simulation-Based Fault Injection and Testing Using the Mutation Technique. 1. Fault Injection Technique: Mutation Testing. 2. The Alien Tool. 3. Conclusion. 4.4: New Acceleration Techniques for