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Systematic Generation of Instruction Test Patterns Based on Architectural Parameters

When we survey hardware design groups, we can find that it is now dedicated to verification between 60 to 80 percent. According to the instruction set architecture information should be a feasible and reasonable way for generating the test pattern to verify the function of a microprocessor. In this these, we¡¦ll present an instruction test pattern (for microprocessors) generation method based on the instruction set architecture. It can help the users to generate the instruction test pattern efficiently.
The generation flow in this thesis contains three major flows: individual instruction, instruction pair, and manual generation. They are used for different verification cases. The ¡§individual instruction¡¨ could be used for verifying the functions of each implemented instructions. The ¡§instruction pair¡¨ could be used for verifying the interaction of instruction execution in a pipeline for a HDL implementation of a microprocessor. The ¡§manual generation¡¨ could be used to verify some corner cases (behaviors) of the microprocessor.
As the quality of our test pattern, we generate some patterns for 32-bits instruction (ARM instruction sets and SPARC instruction sets) and use them to verify a synthesizable RTL core. With some handwriting test pattern (34.7%), our automatic generation method can approach 100% HDL code coverage of the microprocessor design. We use the HDL code coverage as the reference of test pattern quality.
Because our generation method is based on the instruction field, we can describe most instruction set for the generator. Hence, our generation method can retarget to most instruction set architecture without modifying the generator. Besides the RISC instructions, even the CISC instructions could be generated.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:NSYSU/oai:NSYSU:etd-0830101-210728
Date30 August 2001
CreatorsMu, Peter
ContributorsIng-Jer Huang, Fu-Chiung Cheng, Yun-Nan Chang, Chua-Chin Wang, James Kao, Juinm-Dar Huang
PublisherNSYSU
Source SetsNSYSU Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Archive
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typetext
Formatapplication/pdf
Sourcehttp://etd.lib.nsysu.edu.tw/ETD-db/ETD-search/view_etd?URN=etd-0830101-210728
Rightsunrestricted, Copyright information available at source archive

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