EMBER: A Cycle-based Framework for Early-Stage Reliability Assessment in Parametric RTL Designs

Modern trends towards higher architectural complexity and smaller technology nodes do not align with the requirement for reliability that many application domains expose. While system robustness remains one of the most critical aspects for mission-critical application domains, the currently available tools allow designers to accurately investigate the reliability only at the late design stages, limiting the effectiveness of their intervention in addressing architectural vulnerabilities. In this context, this paper presents a novel framework for early-stage reliability assessment that enables fast evaluations to guide the RTL design process, without compromising analysis quality or relying on imprecise high-level fault injection models. In the presented analysis, the paper shows how the proposed framework leads to a significant time saving when targeting highly parametric hardware designs, achieving up to 79x compile time reduction, and up to 37.6x simulation time reduction when compared to other state-of-the-art approaches.