A Two-Level Approach to Automated Conformance Testing of VHDL Designs

Abstract

For manufacturers of consumer electronics, conformance testing of embedded software is a vital issue. To improve performance, parts of this software are implemented in hardware, often designed in the Hardware Description Language VHDL. Conformance testing is a time consuming and error-prone process. Thus automating (parts of) this process is essential.There are many tools for test generation and for VHDL simulation. However, most test generation tools operate on a high level of abstraction and applying the generated tests to a VHDL design is a complicated task. For each specific case one can build a layer of dedicated circuitry and/or software that performs this task. It appears that the A two-level approach to automated conformance testing ofVHDL designs 433 ad-hoc nature of this layer forms the bottleneck of the testing process. We propose a generic solution for bridging this gap: a generic layer of software dedicated to interface with VHDL implementations. It consists of a number of Von Neumannlike components that can be instantiated for each specific VHDL design. This paper reports on the construction of and some initial experiences with a concrete tool environment based on these principles.

Conformance Testing of a Multimedia System Using PHACT

“…Applying and adapting our original PHACT tool environment ( [18]) to the DIVAS gave valuable feedback and resulted in two new platforms for PHACT, while maintaining the overall tool structure. Currently PHACT runs on VHDL, pSOS/C (usable for both QT and IC) and UNDUC environments.…”

“…PHACT, as it has evolved now, is shown in Figure 2. The design of PHACT has been reported on in [18], hence we will not explain all details here. We only mention that the Conformance Kit [3] …”

“…We started from a test tool environment for protocol conformance testing of hardware designs in VHDL called PHACT (PHilips Automated Conformance Tester), which was developed during 1995 and 1996, as reported in IWTCS '97 [18]. PHACT was applied to the development of both the DIVA5 hardware and software.…”

An open framework for the specification and execution of a testable requirements model

“…PHACT supports lUTs written in C or Java. PHACT is not publically available but its use has been documented by case studies [82,149].…”