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. The approach presented 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.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">></ETX>