DA-FIS: A high-speed dynamic adaptive fault injection server framework for reliable FPGA-based embedded systems.
Fatimah Alhayan1, Gaganjot Kaur2, Sultan Alanazi3
1Department of Information Systems, College of Computer and Information Sciences, Princess Nourah bint Abdulrahman University, Riyad, Saudi Arabia.
Peerj. Computer Science
|September 24, 2025
Summary
A new Dynamic Adaptive Fault Injection Server (DA-FIS) offers faster, more efficient fault injection for FPGAs. This advanced framework improves reliability testing in critical systems by enabling real-time, adaptive fault injection with reduced overhead.
Area of Science:
- Electrical Engineering
- Computer Engineering
- Reliability Engineering
Background:
- Fault injection is crucial for FPGA reliability, especially in radiation-prone and safety-critical systems.
- Conventional methods like BUFIT, SCFIT, and DPR have limitations including high resource overhead, slow speeds, and poor adaptability.
- These limitations hinder real-time fault resilience evaluation in embedded systems.
Purpose of the Study:
- To introduce the Dynamic Adaptive Fault Injection Server (DA-FIS), a novel framework for high-speed, scalable, and resource-efficient fault injection in FPGAs.
- To overcome the limitations of existing fault injection techniques.
- To enable precise, real-time fault injection and analysis in FPGA-based systems.
Main Methods:
- Developed DA-FIS featuring a configurable LFSR-based fault generator for adaptive, real-time fault injection.
- Integrated masking logic and dynamic propagation tracking for precise SEU and MBU injection into FPGA configuration memory and logic.
- Implemented and evaluated DA-FIS on a Xilinx Zynq-7000 FPGA using benchmark workloads.
Main Results:
- DA-FIS achieved a fault injection rate of 111.1 faults/s, significantly outperforming BUFIT (53.4), SCFIT (27), and DPR (18.5).
- The framework demonstrated 30% lower FPGA resource overhead compared to SCFIT.
- Scalability was confirmed across different FPGA platforms, suitable for space, automotive, and HPC applications.
Conclusions:
- DA-FIS establishes itself as a superior fault injection framework, offering high-speed, precision-controlled testing with minimal FPGA overhead and enhanced scalability.
- The adaptive architecture and real-time error model adjustments facilitate analysis of fault propagation, error correction, and security vulnerabilities.
- Future research directions include ML-assisted fault modeling and self-healing architectures for enhanced FPGA fault resilience.
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