A Cycle-Accurate Soft Error Vulnerability Analysis Framework for FPGA-based Designs

Abstract: Many aerospace and automotive applications use FPGAs in their designs due to their low power and reconfigurability requirements. Meanwhile, such applications also pose a high standard on system reliability, which makes the early-stage reliability analysis for FPGA-based designs very critical. In this paper, we present a framework that enables fast and accurate early-stage analysis of soft error vulnerability for small FPGA-based designs. Our framework first extracts the post-synthesis netlist from an FPGA design. Then it inserts the bit-flip configuration faults into the design netlist using our proposed interface software. After that, it seamlessly feeds the golden copy and fault copies of the netlist into the open source simulator Verilator for cycle-accurate simulation. Finally, it generates a histogram of vulnerability scores of the original design to guide the reliability analysis. Experimental results show that our framework runs up to 53x faster than the Xilinx Vivado fault simulation with cycle-level accuracy, when analyzing the injected bit-flip faults on the ITC'99 benchmarks.