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MicroTESK: An Extendable Framework for Test Program Generation
Creation of test programs and analysis of their
execution is the main approach to system-level verification of microprocessors. A lot of techniques have been proposed to automate test program generation, ranging from completely random to well directed ones. However, no “silver bullet” has been found. In good industrial practices, various methods are combined complementing each other. Unfortunately, there is no solution that could integrate all (or at least most) of the techniques in a single framework. Engineers are forced to use a number of tools, which leads to the following problems: (1) it is required to maintain duplicating data (each tool uses its own representation of the target design); (2) to be used together, tools need to be integrated (engineers have to deal with different formats and interfaces). This paper proposes a concept of an extendable framework (MicroTESK) that follows a unified methodology for defining test program generation techniques. The framework supports random and combinatorial generation and (what is even more important) can be easily extended with new techniques being implemented as the framework’s plugins.
