Application-aware soft error sensitivity evaluation without fault injections — application to Leon3

Design-time evaluations of the sensitivity of circuits with respect to soft errors are usually done by means of fault injection campaigns. Such campaigns are time-consuming, either in order to prepare the hardware set-up (e.g., prototype on emulation platform) or in terms of simulation run. We propose here an approach avoiding any fault injections but able to evaluate the intrinsic sensitivity of the circuit for a given application by leveraging the work done for functional verification. This approach provides worst-case evaluations with good accuracy and no specific investment. The approach is demonstrated on several applications executed on a Leon3 microprocessor.