RTL Fault Injection of a Deployed Graph Neural Network Trigger for Belle II

Abstract

As particle physics detectors grow in scale, High Energy Physics experiments must process ever-increasing data volumes. Level-1 trigger systems, implemented on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays and increasingly using neural-network algorithms, filter this data in real time. However, their proximity to the interaction point exposes them to radiation, which can corrupt outputs, stall processing pipelines, or damage hardware, with significant financial and scientific consequences. In this work, we present the first Register Transfer Level fault-injection study of a deployed Level-1 hardware neural-network trigger, GNN-ETM in the Belle II trigger system. We target three failure modes most consequential to a real-time trigger pipeline: deadlocks, timeouts, and packet-integrity violations. Through two complementary campaigns, we inject 1 442 840 Single-Event Upsets across 211 245 signals. We find a monitoring asymmetry in the existing verification infrastructure and propose inter-stage liveness monitoring as a more accurate alternative to output-only observation, showing that Mean Time To Failure estimates from the two approaches differ by up to 78.7%. The resulting per-stage data identifies the highest-priority hardening targets.