Perturbation based workload augmentation for comprehensive functional safety analysis

Prasanth, V and Parekhji, R and Amrutur, B (2019) Perturbation based workload augmentation for comprehensive functional safety analysis. In: 32nd International Conference on VLSI Design, VLSID 2019, 5 January 2019-9 January 2019, New Delhi, pp. 293-298.

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Abstract

Integrated circuits are being used in many safety critical applications, wherein these circuits interact with physical systems. We are seeing a paradigm shift in the design of such systems where both digital / mixed signal circuits and physical systems are co-designed. However, the same does not hold true when it comes to safety. Safety analysis for such critical systems is still performed for the integrated circuit and physical components separately. Methods have been proposed for their co-evaluation; however, practical adoption is still limited due to analysis complexity and concerns about their comprehensiveness. Absence of a comprehensive set of workloads for safety analysis in turn impacts the dependability of results. In this paper, we examine this problem and propose a new method to incrementally augment workloads using a local perturbation technique, so as to render the augmented set to be more comprehensive. This method has been applied to several electric motor control and digital power control routines as well as a physical system for inverter operation driving an AC load using a microcontroller based system. Compared to earlier methods, the proposed method is able to identify additional critical flip-flops. For the control routines, 112 additional flip-flops (26 increase) were identified over an average of six perturbation iterations. For the inverter application, 4 additional critical flip-flops (12.5 increase) were identified over 4 perturbation iterations. These results indicate that the proposed perturbation technique is both effective and affordable. © 2019 IEEE.

Item Type:	Conference Paper
Publication:	Proceedings - 32nd International Conference on VLSI Design, VLSID 2019 - Held concurrently with 18th International Conference on Embedded Systems, ES 2019
Publisher:	Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Additional Information:	The copyright for this article belongs to Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Keywords:	Electric network analysis; Electric power system control; Embedded systems; Flip flop circuits; Power control; Safety engineering; VLSI circuits, Electric motor control; Fault injection; Inverter application; Microcontroller based systems; Physical components; Safety analysis; Safety critical applications; Workload augmentation, Perturbation techniques
Department/Centre:	Division of Electrical Sciences > Computer Science & Automation Others
Date Deposited:	27 Dec 2022 05:40
Last Modified:	27 Dec 2022 05:40
URI:	https://eprints.iisc.ac.in/id/eprint/78579

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