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Publication

Data Flow Testing for Virtual Prototypes

Muhammad Hassan; Vladimir Herdt; Hoang M. Le; Mingsong Chen; Daniel Große; Rolf Drechsler
In: Design, Automation and Test in Europe (DATE). Design, Automation & Test in Europe (DATE-2017), March 27-31, Lausanne, Switzerland, 2017.

Abstract

Data flow testing (DFT) has been shown to be aneffective testing strategy. DFT features a high fault detectionrate while avoiding the intense scalability problems to achievefull path coverage. In this paper we propose to apply data flowtesting for SystemC virtual prototypes (VPs). Our contributionis twofold: First, we develop a set of SystemC specific coveragecriteria for data flow testing. This requires to consider the Sys-temC semantics of using non-preemptive thread scheduling withshared memory communication and event-based synchronization.Second, we explain how to automatically compute the data flowcoverage result for a given VP using a combination of staticand dynamic analysis techniques. The coverage result providesclear suggestions for the testing engineer to add new testcases inorder to improve the coverage result. Our experimental resultson real-world VPs demonstrate the applicability and efficacy ofour analysis approach and the SystemC specific coverage criteriato improve the testsuite.