Coverage evaluation of post-silicon validation tests with virtual prototypes

Abstract

Abstract-High-quality tests for post-silicon validation should be ready before a silicon device becomes available in order to save time spent on preparing, debugging and fixing tests after the device is available. Test coverage is an important metric for evaluating the quality and readiness of post-silicon tests. We propose an online-capture offline-replay approach to coverage evaluation of post-silicon validation tests with virtual prototypes for estimating silicon device test coverage. We first capture necessary data from a concrete execution of the virtual prototype within a virtual platform under a given test, and then compute the test coverage by efficiently replaying this execution offline on the virtual prototype itself. Our approach provides early feedback on quality of post-silicon validation tests before silicon is ready. To ensure fidelity of early coverage evaluation, our approach have been further extended to support coverage evaluation and conformance checking in the post-silicon stage. We have applied our approach to evaluate a suite of common tests on virtual prototypes of five network adapters. Our approach was able to reliably estimate that this suite achieves high functional coverage on all five silicon devices.

Automatic generation of high-coverage tests for RTL designs using software techniques and tools

“…For high-level synthesis, symbolic execution is used for executing both high-level C design and low-level RTL design symbolically and then equivalence checking is conducted. For post-silicon functional validation, symbolic execution of virtual devices has been employed to support test generation [11,27,28] and conformance checking [12,29,30].…”

A Survey of Virtual Prototyping Techniques for System Development and Validation

“…Virtual prototyping techniques provide potentials for solving the above challenges without available silicon devices. In some recent research, Kai et al [10,12,23] present a systematic approach to accelerating post-silicon functional validation with virtual prototypes. In the presilicon stage, post-silicon test coverage is estimated by evaluating the test cases on the virtual prototypes.…”

“…However, there lacks of good coverage metrics methodologies for evaluating post-silicon tests on hardware devices. In paper [23], Kai et al proposed some hardware-related coverage metrics for evaluating post-silicon tests with virtual prototypes. Their approach applied the validation tests to virtual devices to estimate the coverage on corresponding silicon devices.…”