SEUs Mitigation on Program Counter of the LEON3 Soft Processor

Analyzing and evaluating the sensitivity of embedded systems to soft-errors have always been a challenge for aerospace or safety equipment designer. Different automated fault-injection methods have been developed for evaluating the sensitivity of integrated circuit. Also many techniques have been developed to get a fault tolerant architecture in order to mask and mitigate fault injection in a circuit. Fault injection mitigation and repair techniques are applied together on LEON3 processor in goal to study the reliability of a soft-core. The so-called NETlist Fault Injection (NETFI+) tool is a fault injection techniques used in this paper. The prediction of Single Event Upset (SEU) error-rates between radiation ground testing and FPGA implementation have been done with good and accurate result. But no functional simulations have been performed. A Triple Modular Redundancy (TMR) is used in this paper as a repair technique versus fault injection. This paper analyses the effectiveness of fault tolerant method on LEON3 soft-core running a benchmark. It starts by evaluating the behavior of LEON3’s program counter against Single Event Upset error-rate accuracy between the functional simulation and the FPGA emulation and an analysis of the LEON3 reliability in presence of fault tolerant technique. The objective is to offer, through the new version of NETFI+ with introducing a fault tolerant technique, the possibility to designers to evaluate the benefits of SEUs mitigation for the LEON3 processor on the program counter. Keywords—NETFI+ ; fault injection; SEUs; LEON3; simulation; emulation; reliability; TMR