Martin Matschnig

A netlist-level fault-injection tool for FPGAs

A fault-injection tool can be very interesting in context to safety-critical applications, e.g., to test fault-detection and avoidance mechanisms or simply to stress an application and analyze its behavior when faults occur. In this work, a fault-injection tool is presented which can be used to instrument an FPGA design with fault-injection logic on netlist level during the implementation phase and to inject faults during runtime afterwards. The proposed approach can be smoothly integrated into an industrial FPGA tool flow, supports devices from multiple FPGA vendors and is highly configurable in order to fit to the number of available FPGA logic resources. Differences to related approaches which are applied on either HDL- and netlist-level as well as on the FPGA configuration bitstream are described. Finally, some results are presented to prove the applicability of the proposed solution.ZusammenfassungTools zur Fehlerinjektion können speziell im Kontext von sicherheitskritischen Applikationen hilfreich sein, um etwa Mechanismen zur Fehlererkennung und -vermeidung zu testen oder das Verhalten einer Applikation im Fehlerfall zu überprüfen. Diese Arbeit beschreibt ein derartiges Werkzeug, das es erlaubt, ein FPGA-Design mit Zusatzlogik zur Fehlerinjektion im Zuge der Implementierungsphase auf Netzlisten-Ebene zu instrumentieren und danach zur Laufzeit Fehler am FPGA einzustreuen. Das vorgestellte Tool fügt sich in einen industriellen FPGA Tool Flow ein, unterstützt Devices verschiedener FPGA-Hersteller und kann durch entsprechende Konfiguration an die verfügbaren FPGA-Ressourcen angepasst werden. Die Arbeit geht auf Unterschiede zu existierenden Lösungen ein, die auf HDL- oder Netzlisten-Ebene, aber auch direkt im FPGA-Konfigurations-Bitstream Fehler injizieren. Schlussendlich werden einige Implementierungsergebnisse präsentiert, welche die Sinnhaftigkeit des vorgestellten Ansatzes belegen.

Logic synthesis of assertions for saftey-critical applications

In this work we propose the rather new approach to synthesize properties formulated in verification languages, in particular PSL, down to hardware level. Such flow can be useful especially for safety-critical applications to automatically generate runtime monitors at little additional design efforts. Existing assertion synthesis tools from both academia and industry are presented as well as evaluation results concerning their features and drawbacks. The main part of this work focuses on the development of a proposed own tool flow which could benefit from available commercial and/or open-source tools like PSL parsers and equivalence checkers. The paper concludes with an outlook to future work in order to smoothly integrate our proposed approach into an existing state-of-the-art FPGA design flow. First resource estimations from previous work showed that optimized hardware assertion checkers may make up only a few percentage of the designs complete size.

Co-Engineering-in-the-Loop

System safety standards have been available for two decades. Remarkably, none of the functional safety standards gave detailed guidance on how to treat potential security risks; security was – if at all – only mentioned in a small remark. However, the way how systems are built has changed; today’s safety-critical systems are more and more integrated in networks and, thus, the old paradigm of isolated systems is not any more valid. It has been recognized that safety and security, and since recently also performance, need to be treated in combination: Co-engineering is required. After a short glance at the state of the art in co-engineering methods and in respective standardization, the paper describes the approach of co-engineering with interaction points taken in the ECSEL project AQUAS, which has been running since May 2017. The methodology is illustrated with first details on how the co-engineering approach for the concept phase is realized in the industrial drive use case provided by Siemens AG Austria.

Industrial IoT für Smart Grid-Anwendungen im Feld

ZusammenfassungDie Energiewende bewirkt eine Transformation des Energiesystems, die zu großen Herausforderungen für den Verteilernetzbetrieb führt. Dies ist der Tatsache geschuldet, dass bis dato passive Verteilernetz-Abschnitte, welche historisch reine Verbraucher waren, nunmehr durch dort verortete dezentrale Erzeugung und proaktive Netzteilnehmer – wie Photovoltaikanlage, Speicher und E-Mobility – aktiv Einfluss auf den Netzbetrieb nehmen. Durch die Integration und den Einsatz intelligenter Automatisierung sollen diese Netzabschnitte in Zukunft aktiv gesteuert werden. Das daraus resultierende Gesamtsystem stellt ein cyber-physikalisches System dar, dass durch einen hohen Komplexitätsgrad gekennzeichnet ist und die elektrische und algorithmische Welt mittels geeigneter IKT-Infrastruktur koppelt. Es ist davon auszugehen, dass die Steuerung und Automatisierung in solchen Systemen immer individueller wird. Dafür bedarf es flexibler und (hinsichtlich Installation und Wartung) einfach zu bedienender Automatisierungssysteme, die es den Betreibern von Verteilernetzen erlauben, individualisierte Lösungen nahtlos in ihren Netzen zu integrieren. Dieser Beitrag beschreibt einen Systemansatz, der aufbauend auf einer Industrial Internet-of-Things(IoT)-Plattform die Interaktion der notwendigen physikalischen Modelle und Anwendungen realisiert und somit zur Lösung dieser Herausforderungen eingesetzt werden kann.AbstractCurrently an increased integration of distributed energy resources and prosumers into the distribution system can be observed. These new resources range from renewable energy resources such as PV-systems, to storage systems, and e-mobility charging stations. This trend is coined under the term “Energiewende” and presents a challenge for the system operators, as the grid-level (where the integration of these entities happens) was initially designed for distribution purposes only and was thus operated passively. In order to mitigate and solve resulting problems, intelligent automation systems can be used to actively operate these grids. The resulting system constitutes a cyber physical system, which is characterized by a high degree of complexity and connects the electrical and the algorithmic world, using a suitable ICT infrastructure. As the control and automatization of such systems becomes more and more individual, flexible and simple to use (regarding installation and maintenance) automation systems are required, which allow the operator the seamless integration of individualized solutions into their grids. This article describes a system approach that is based on industrial Internet-of-Things technology and allows realizing the required interaction between the physical models and applications; thus presenting a solution to solve these challenges.