Cross-domain Analog Fault Injection for Designing Robust Smart Systems

Under the pressure of the Industry 4.0 revolution, and now with the European Chips Act, smart systems are becoming omnipresent in all industrial sectors, e.g., automotive and aerospace. Such systems contain digital and analog components belonging to several physical domains, e.g., electrical and mechanical. To ensure robustness, the whole system must be validated as early as possible in the development cycle, by taking into account all such domains, as recommended by the ISO 26262 standard in the case, e.g., of automotive systems. Unfortunately, validation techniques, including fault injection and simulation are not as advanced on the analog side as the digital counterpart: i) they are not fully standardized ii) they are highly domain-dependent, and iii) they are performed separately from the digital flow. This article proposes to improve the design of smart systems by generating faulty scenarios through analog fault injection across several physical domains. By exploiting these faulty scenarios, it is possible to improve the robustness of the analog part and, at the same time, to improve the quality of the digital part that controls the system functionality. A multi-domain case study containing a microcontroller and a three-axis accelerometer is presented to demonstrate the validity of the proposed approach in many industrial contexts.