Efficient Checkpointing-Based Safety-Verification Flow Using Compiled-Code Simulation

The verification complexity of safety-critical systems on chip increased manifold after the introduction of ISO 26262, the safety standard for automotive applications. As a result, checkpoint-restore techniques have been implemented to speed-up fault-injection simulations of register-transfer level and gate-level models. However, these techniques are not suitable for safety verification, since they have high hard-disk space requirements, long generation time, and are mainly generated manually. To address these limitations, in this paper, we present a compiled-code-based snapshotting mechanism, which automatically generates an arbitrary amount of checkpoints post-simulation from a model's simulation traces. Our approach uses three to four orders of magnitude less hard-disk space than commercial tools and generates checkpoints 5x to 12x faster. Finally, fault-injection simulations with our approach run 6.75x to 27x faster than with commercial tools.