PACE - a microprogram evaluation system

Abstract

This paper describes PACE (Product Assurance Code Evaluation) System, a tool for evaluating microprograms. PACE incorporates both static analysis and dynamic analysis capabilities and it provides features that enable systematic and comprehensive evaluations of large-scale microcoded systems. The PACE static analysis capability performs a control flow analysis of the code being evaluated, reports various anomalous program constructs, and generates a program flow graph that is subsequently employed by PACE's dynamic analysis procedures. The PACE dynamic analysis capability uses encoded execution trace data to produce microcode test-coverage reports and formatted code-execution traces. The dynamic analysis capability provides quantitative code execution coverage data that enables an assessment of testing thoroughness and is useful in the identification of effective regression test cases.