An FPGA-Based Emulation Platform for Functional Safety Verification in Automotive SoC Systems

The increasing complexity of automotive SoC systems, particularly in the context of autonomous vehicles, demands rigorous functional safety verification methods. This paper proposes a novel Functional Safety FPGA Fault Injection Tool (FSF-FIT) which builds an FPGA-based emulation platform by using FPGA fault injection techniques. The core innovation of FSFFIT lies in its comprehensive FPGA functional safety evaluation process, targeting specific components within the Design Under Test (DUT), down to individual LUTs or registers. This detailed approach allows for accurate reliability level (RL) and diagnostic coverage (DC) assessments of safety mechanisms. The speed and accuracy of FSFFIT were validated through experiments conducted on the XuanTie C906 RISC-V processor as well as on a multiplier with different security mechanisms. The results demonstrated that FSFFIT’s performance is consistent with that of SSIM, a certified ISO26262-compliant functional safety tool, while also achieving faster execution times. Additionally, by comparing the results with some state-of-the-art (SOTA) FPGA fault injection tools, our method is superior in terms of injection speed.