Contrast of a HDL model and COTS version of a microprocessor for soft-error testing

Reliability evaluation of Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) processors against faults induced by radiation is a challenging problem. Some alternatives have been proposed to radiation test but they are very time consuming and lack of the observability needed. This work analyses the possibility to use an HDL model for estimating applications dependability on Texas Instruments MSP430 processor early in the development phase. Different fault injection methods are used showing the advantages of FPGA emulation over direct injection on real devices. The register file vulnerability is compared and analyzed for each individual register and considering the overall resource. Results show significant similarities in error rate for most used registers and differences in estimation below 9% when the entire register file is considered.