On the Use of Dynamic Binary Instrumentation to Perform Faults Injection in Transaction Level Models

Transaction Level Modelling (TLM) has been widely accepted as systems modelling framework focused in system components communication. This approach allows efficient accurate estimation and rapid design space exploration. Besides of the functional simulation for validation of a hardware/software designs, there are additional reliability requirements that need advanced simulation techniques to analyze the system behaviour in the presence of faults. Several traditional VHDL fault injection mechanisms like mutants or saboteurs have been adapted to SystemC model descriptions. The main drawback of these approaches is the necessity of source code modification to carry out the fault injection campaigns. In this paper, we propose the use of Dynamic Binary Instrumentation (DBI) to perform fault injection in SystemC TLM models. DBI is a technique to intercept software routine calls allowing argument and return value corruption and data structures modification at runtime. This technique needs neither source code modifications nor recompilation of models in order to generate module mutants or in order to insert saboteurs in the signal communication path.