A study in coverage-driven test generation

Promising directions in hardware design verification

“…Without this choice, which required knowledge of the pipeline architecture, we would have had to include src1 and pipe2.dest as part of the coverage module state. Manually-constructed coverage modules have been successfully used for coverage analysis and vector generation of industrial designs [15,16,17]. A drawback of a manually-constructed coverage module is that it may not be a correct abstraction of the implementation.…”

“…ATPG techniques, theoretically more complex but often computationally feasible in practice [24], can be used to generate input sequences to cover the remaining uncovered transitions. Validation of industrial designs [15,16,17] typically use a multitude of techniques proceeding from the simple to the complex. Recently, Ho et al [18] have combined a number of input-generation techniques to achieve validation on designs beyond the reach of formal verification tools.…”

Assisting the definition and execution of test suites for complex systems

“…From requirements and use cases, tests can be generated. Finally, following [3], it is possible to bridge the gap between formal verification and simulation by using hybrid techniques. Traditional techniques based on simulation can only verify operation over a small subset of the state space and it is often hard to generate tests to hit interesting corner cases.…”

“…Traditional techniques based on simulation can only verify operation over a small subset of the state space and it is often hard to generate tests to hit interesting corner cases. Therefore, in [3] coverage of formal models is used just to specify tests. Each measurable action is called a coverage task, and together these form a coverage model.…”

“…In recent literature, such as in [3] [4] [5] [9] [12], we can find several approaches of the different directions that researchers are following for system testing. As we shall justify, most of all this work is applicable to systems with a behavioural model that must account for sequences of operations in which later operations depend on actions taken by earlier operations.…”