Emulation-based hierarchical fault-injection framework for coarse-to-fine vulnerability analysis of hardware-accelerated approximate algorithms

This paper proposes a hierarchical fault injection emulation framework tailored to the structure of complex and large application-specific circuits, that performs vulnerability analysis of the system for single event upsets (SEUs) at different design granularities in real-time. In particular, the framework allows for efficient probabilistic modelling of the SEU impact, making it particularly applicable for hardware-accelerated approximate applications such as multimedia, computer vision and image/signal processing, due to its high processing speed and real-time capabilities. The framework is emulated on an FPGA-based platform and evaluated using a depth computation kernel, both in standalone manner as well as within a robotic obstacle avoidance application.