Publication Details
Functional Verification Based Platform for Evaluating Fault Tolerance Properties
Čekan Ondřej, Ing., Ph.D. (UFYZ)
Lojda Jakub, Ing., Ph.D. (DCSY)
Zachariášová Marcela, Ing., Ph.D. (DCSY)
Krčma Martin, Ing., Ph.D. (UFYZ)
Kotásek Zdeněk, doc. Ing., CSc.
Functional verification, Robot controller, Electro-mechanical systems, Fault
tolerance, Maze generation
The fundamental topic of this article is the interconnection of simulation-based
functional verification, which is standardly used for removing design errors from
simulated hardware systems, with fault-tolerant mechanisms that serve for
hardening electro-mechanical FPGA SRAM-based systems against faults. For this
purpose, an evaluation platform that connects these two approaches was designed
and tested for one particular casestudy: a robot that moves through a maze (its
electronic part is the robot controller and the mechanical part is the robot
itself). However, in order to make the evaluation platform generally applicable
for various electro-mechanical systems, several subtopics and sub-problems need
to solved. For example, the electronic controller can have several
representations (hard-coded, processor based, neural-network based) and for each
option, extendability of verification environment must be possible. Furthermore,
in order to check complex behavior of verified systems, different verification
scenarios must be prepared and this is the role of random generators or effective
regression tests scenarios. Also, despite the transfer of the controller to the
SRAM-based FPGA which was solved together with an injection of artificial faults,
many more experiments must be done in order to create a sufficient fault-tolerant
methodology that indicates how a general electronic controller can be hardened
against faults by different fault-tolerant mechanisms in order to make it
reliable enough in the real environment. All these additional topics are
presented in this article together with some side experiments that led to their
integration into the evaluation platform.
@article{BUT144405,
author="Jakub {Podivínský} and Ondřej {Čekan} and Jakub {Lojda} and Marcela {Zachariášová} and Martin {Krčma} and Zdeněk {Kotásek}",
title="Functional Verification Based Platform for Evaluating Fault Tolerance Properties",
journal="Microprocessors and Microsystems",
year="2017",
volume="52",
number="5",
pages="145--159",
doi="10.1016/j.micpro.2017.06.004",
issn="0141-9331",
url="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0141933117300200"
}