HachiFI: A Lightweight SoC Architecture-Independent Fault-Injection Framework for SEU Impact Evaluation

Single-Event Upsets (SEUs), triggered by energetic particles, manifest as unexpected bit-flips in memory cells or registers, potentially causing significant anomalies in electronic devices. Driven by the needs of safety-critical applications, it is crucial to evaluate the reliability of these electronic devices before they are deployed. However, traditional reliability analysis techniques, such as irradiation experiments, are costly, while fault injection (FI) simulations often fail to provide full coverage and have limited effectiveness and accuracy. To address these issues, we introduce HachiFI, a lightweight, architecture-independent framework that automates fault injection with 100% coverage via memory and scan-chain accesses and simulates the behavior of SEUs based on specific cross-sections. HachiFI supports configurable fault injection patterns for both system-level and module-level reliability analysis. Using HachiFI, we demonstrate a low hardware overhead (<2%) and a high match (R²=0.984) between FI and irradiation experiments, verified on a 22nm edge-AI chip.