{"title":"Incremental Concolic Testing of Register-Transfer Level Designs","authors":"Hasini Witharana, Aruna Jayasena, Prabhat Mishra","doi":"10.1145/3655621","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Concolic testing is a scalable solution for automated generation of directed tests for validation of hardware designs. Unfortunately, concolic testing fails to cover complex corner cases such as hard-to-activate branches. In this paper, we propose an incremental concolic testing technique to cover hard-to-activate branches in register-transfer level (RTL) models. We show that a complex branch condition can be viewed as a sequence of easy-to-activate events. We map the branch coverage problem to the coverage of a sequence of events. We propose an efficient algorithm to cover the sequence of events using concolic testing. Specifically, the test generated to activate the current event is used as the starting point to activate the next event in the sequence. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach can be used to generate directed tests to cover complex corner cases in RTL models while state-of-the-art methods fail to activate them.","PeriodicalId":50944,"journal":{"name":"ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.2000,"publicationDate":"2024-03-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems","FirstCategoryId":"94","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3655621","RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q3","JCRName":"COMPUTER SCIENCE, HARDWARE & ARCHITECTURE","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Concolic testing is a scalable solution for automated generation of directed tests for validation of hardware designs. Unfortunately, concolic testing fails to cover complex corner cases such as hard-to-activate branches. In this paper, we propose an incremental concolic testing technique to cover hard-to-activate branches in register-transfer level (RTL) models. We show that a complex branch condition can be viewed as a sequence of easy-to-activate events. We map the branch coverage problem to the coverage of a sequence of events. We propose an efficient algorithm to cover the sequence of events using concolic testing. Specifically, the test generated to activate the current event is used as the starting point to activate the next event in the sequence. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach can be used to generate directed tests to cover complex corner cases in RTL models while state-of-the-art methods fail to activate them.
期刊介绍:
TODAES is a premier ACM journal in design and automation of electronic systems. It publishes innovative work documenting significant research and development advances on the specification, design, analysis, simulation, testing, and evaluation of electronic systems, emphasizing a computer science/engineering orientation. Both theoretical analysis and practical solutions are welcome.