A Mutation Model for the SystemC TLM 2.0 Communication Interfaces

Abstract

Mutation analysis is a widely-adopted strategy in software testing with two main purposes: measuring the quality of test suites, and identifying redundant code in programs. Similar approaches are applied in hardware verification and testing too, especially at RTL or gate level, where mutants are generally referred as faults, and mutation analysis is performed by means of fault modeling and fault simulation. However, in modern embedded systems there is a close integration between HW and SW parts, and verification strategies should be applied early in the design flow. This requires the definition of new mutation analysis-based strategies that work at system level, where HW and SW functionalities are not partitioned yet. In this context, the paper proposes a mutation model for perturbing transaction level modeling (TLM) SystemC descriptions. In particular, the main constructs provided by the SystemC TLM 2.0 library have been analyzed, and a set of mutants is proposed to perturb the primitives related to the TLM communication interfaces. Related worksSeveral approaches [8-13], empirical studies [14] and frameworks [15, 16] have been presented in the literature for 978-3-9810801-3-1/DATE08

On Studying the Effectiveness of Extended Finite State Machine Based Test Selection Criteria

“…Two EFSMs are distinguishable if there exists an input sequence that when applied to the initial configurations of these machines the output sequences produced by each machine in response to the input sequence are different. Methods for deriving distinguishing sequences for EFSMs are reported in [21]; analysis and lists of types of EFSM and other behavior models mutants are reported in various publications such as [4,7,9,12,13,15,22].…”

RTL-TLM equivalence checking based on simulation

“…The TLM interface of the transactor (that is correct-by-construction) is mutated by injecting TLM faults. We propose the TLM fault injection technology presented in [14]. In particular, the TLM primitives are analyzed and represented by using the extended finite state machine (EFSM) model [15].…”

White-Box Error Effect Simulation for Assisted Safety Analysis

“…Therefore this approach is not feasible for our use case. The most promising solution provides mutation based fault injection [6]- [8]. But most of the presented works focus on low-level models or the usage of simulation-primitives for fault injection.…”