Working Conditions-Aware Fault Injection Technique

Abstract : With new integration rates, the circuits sensitivity to environmental and working conditions has increased dramatically. Thus, presenting reliable, less consuming energy and error resilient architectures is being one of the major problems to deal with. Besides, evaluating robustness and effectiveness of the proposed architectures is also an urgent need. In this paper, we present an extension of SimpleScalar simulation tool having the ability to inject faults in a given cache architecture. We tried to focus on transient errors which are due to cosmic rays (soft errors) or to voltage scaling and high temperatures. During the fault injection process, there is no software traps and the target application isn't modified. Transient errors are modeled by a bit flip. The bit flip may occur in any part of the cache arrays and also in the cache blocks' address. In this paper we present an overview on the existing fault injection techniques. Then, we propose a fuzzy system which models the relationship between working conditions (the supply voltage and temperature) and the error probability. The impact of the injected faults on the cache performance as well as the experimental results are also shown. The results show that the impact of faults depends also on the application itself.