Extensible Environment for Test Program Generation for Microprocessors

摘要

Development of test programs and analysis of the results of their execution is the basic approach to verification of microprocessors at the system level. There is a variety of methods for the automation of test generation, starting with the generation of random code and ending with directed model-based test generation. However, there is no cure-all method. In practice, combinations of various complementary techniques are used. Unfortunately, no solution for the integration of various test generation methods into a unified environment is currently available. To test a microprocessor, verification engineers are forced to use many different test generators, which results in a number of difficulties, such as (1) the necessity to ensure the compatibility of tool configurations (in each tool, a specific description of the target microprocessor is used, which leads to duplication of information); (2) the necessity to develop utilities for integration tools (different tools have different interfaces and use different data formats). This paper describes a concept of extensible environment for test program generation for microprocessors. This environment provides a unified approach for test generation; it supports widespread test generation techniques, and can be extended by new testing tools. The proposed concept was partially implemented in MicroTESK (Microprocessor TEsting and Specification Kit).