Publication
Cross-Level Processor Verification via Endless Randomized Instruction Stream Generation with Coverage-guided Aging
Niklas Bruns; Vladimir Herdt; Eyck Jentzsch; Rolf Drechsler
In: Design, Automation and Test in Europe Conference (DATE). Design, Automation & Test in Europe (DATE-2022), March 14-23, Antwerpen, Belgium, 2022.
Abstract
We propose a novel cross-level verification approach for processor verification at the Register-Transfer Level (RTL). The foundation is a randomized coverage-guided instruction stream generator that produces one endless and unrestricted instruction stream that evolves dynamically at runtime. We leverage an Instruction Set Simulator (ISS) as a reference model in a tight co-simulation setting. Coverage information is continuously updated based on the execution state of the ISS and we employ Coverage-guided Aging to smooth out the coverage distribution of the randomized instruction stream over the time. In combination, this enables a broad and deep coverage to find intricate cornercase bugs in the RTL processor. Our case study with an industrial pipelined 32 bit RISC-V processor demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.