A Survey on Fault Injection Techniques

Haissam Ziade ¹, Rafic Ayoubi ², and Raoul Velazco ³

¹ Faculty of Engineering I, Lebanese University, Lebanon

² Faculty of Engineering, University of Balamand, Lebanon

³ IMAG Institute, TIMA Laboratory, France 

Abstract: Fault tolerant circuits are currently required in several major application sectors. Besides and in complement to other possible approaches such as proving or analytical modeling whose applicability and accuracy are significantly restricted in the case of complex fault tolerant systems, fault-injection has been recognized to be particularly attractive and valuable. Fault injection provides a method of assessing the dependability of a system under test. It involves inserting faults into a system and monitoring the system to determine its behavior in response to a fault. Several fault injection techniques have been proposed and practically experimented. They can be grouped into hardware-based fault injection, software-based fault injection, simulation-based fault injection, emulation-based fault injection and hybrid fault injection. This paper presents a survey on fault injection techniques with comparison of the different injection techniques and an overview on the different tools. 

Keywords: Fault tolerance, fault injection, fault simulation, VLSI circuits, fault injector, VHDL fault models.

 Received May 19, 2003; accepted October 13, 2003