The study of SEU fault injection techniques for LSFT32 microprocessor

摘要

SFT32 is a kind of RISC microprocessor designed specifically for space-oriented applications, in accommodating with the radioactive environment in space, we employed some techniques confronting with SEU (Single Event Upset) from the design of system architecture. But because we couldn’t get both the facilities necessary to simulate the design and the way to generate the fault patterns in the design period, SEU fault patterns, as we scheduled offering the microprocessor immune, couldn’t take place as needed, so the effectiveness of fault tolerance could not be verified, this inevitably increases the challenge for design and verification. This paper, with regard the features of space-oriented fault tolerance microprocessor LSFT32, investigated the techniques about fault simulation and fault injection, presented a kind of processor built-in module technique for fault injection. This technique could be implemented by way of virtual or by hardware, SEU fault instances can be injected into memory cells (CACHE or register heap) of LSFT32 through fault injection module by instructions, and generating the cases for SEU test, simulating the SEU effect when LSFT32 embedded with RAM, implementing the facility of fault injection for LSFT32 with memory cells, providing with the prerequisite conditions for verifying the fault tolerable design of LSFT32 microprocessor. This will be a great help both to the fault tolerance design and verification of LSFT32 processor, and to the subsequent development and verification of system software and application software with error injections. This controlled fault injection method played a key role in the design of LSFT32 microprocessor, and significantly reduced the development time for test software. The effectiveness of fault tolerance design can also be consolidated through the well performance of LSFT32 in SEU radiation test.