An Analysis of Fault Effects and Propagations in AVR Microcontroller ATmega103(L)

Abstract

This paper presents an analysis of the effects and propagations of transient faults by simulation-based fault injection into the AVR microcontroller. This analysis is done by injecting 20000 transient faults into main components of the AVR microcontroller that is described in VHDL language. The sensitivity level of various points of the AVR microcontroller such as ALU, Instruction-Register, Program-Counter, Register-file and Flag Registers against fault manifestation is considered and evaluated. The behavior of AVR microcontroller against injected faults is reported and shown that about 41.46% of faults are recovered in simulation time, 53.84% of faults are effective faults and reminding 4.70% of faults are latent faults; moreover a comparison of the behavior of AVR microcontroller in fault injection experiments against some common microprocessors is done. Results of fault analyzing will be used in the future research to propose the fault-tolerant AVR microcontroller.