Design fault directed test generation for microprocessor validation

Functional validation of modern microprocessors is an important and complex problem. One of the problems in functional validation is the generation of test cases that has higher potential to find faults in the design. We propose a model based test generation framework that generates tests for design fault classes inspired from software validation. There are two main contributions in this paper. Firstly, we propose a microprocessor modeling and test generation framework that generates test suites to satisfy Modified Condition Decision Coverage (MCDC), a structural coverage metric that detects most of the classified design faults as well as the remaining faults not covered by MCDC. Secondly, we show that there exists good correlation between types of design faults proposed by software validation and the errors/bugs reported in case studies on microprocessor validation. We demonstrate the framework by modeling and generating tests for the microarchitecture of VESPA, a 32-bit microproc...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: DATE
• Authors: Deepak Mathaikutty, Sandeep K. Shukla, Sreekumar V. Kodakara, David J. Lilja, Ajit Dingankar
• Keywords: DATE 2007, Design Faults, Functional Validation, Hardware, Test Generation Framework