USING HEAVY-ION RADIATION TO VALIDATE FAULT-HANDLING MECHANISMS

Fault injection is an effective method for studying the effects of faults in computer systems and for validating fault-handling mechanisms. Our approach involves injecting transient faults into integrated circuits by using heavy-ion radiation from a Californium-252 source. The proliferation of safety-critical and fault-tolerant systems using VLSI technology makes such attempts to inject faults at internal locations in VLSI circuits increasingly important.