An Efficient Parallel Fault Simulator for Functional Patterns on Multi-Core Systems

Fault simulation targeting functional patterns emerges as an essential mechanism within functional safety, crucial for validating the effectiveness of safety mechanisms. The acceleration of fault simulation for functional patterns is imperative for boosting the efficiency and adaptability of functional safety verification, presenting a significant yet unresolved challenge. In the paper, we propose an efficient fault simulator for functional patterns, utilizing three techniques including fault filtering, fault grouping, and CPU-based parallelism. The integration of these three techniques, tailored to the characteristics of functional patterns, reduces the runtime of fault simulation from different perspectives. The experimental results show that on a 48-core system, an average 79x speedup can be achieved by our parallel fault simulator against a commercial tool.