Hi everyone,
I was wondering if anyone can point me to some formal method to validate a soft processor core.
We have the source code (vhdl) and a simulation environment to load programs and execute them, but I'm not sure in this case code coeverage will be sufficient. What about cases like interrupt handling?
I can run Dhrystone or CoreMark, but will it be sufficient?
Any idea/pointer/comment is appreciated,
Al
-- A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text. Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing? A: Top-posting. Q: What is the most annoying thing on usenet and in e-mail?
Hi Al,
I assume you know that Code Coverage has nothing to do with formal Verification and/or tells you if your processor is bug free, it just measure of the quality of your testbench.
If you want to formally test your processor then AFAIK your only option is to start writing lots of assertion and spend a years salary on a formal tool (solidify/Questa formal/etc). You can also run assertions in your simulator (like Modelsim DE/Riviera Pro) but this will not be exhaustive.
If your processor is small you might get away of writing top level assertions but most likely (due to the cone of logic) you will have to formally prove sub-blocks and use good old testvectors for the interconnects.
What do you think ;-)
If you have a golden reference model then I would suggest a regression suite with lots of constrained random generated instructions, interrupt test programs, OS load, etc and comparing the output to your reference model.
I would also suggest you look up the (old) Viper processor which was a hot topic when I was working in the space industry.
Good luck,
Regards, Hans.
Hi Tim,
Tim Wescott wrote: []
This test harness could effectively be running on a simulator, where I could use a golden model and crosscheck that throwing random interrupts does not cause any deviation from the golden model behavior.
The main difficulty I see would be the functional coverage model I need to put in place to tell me I'm done.
There might be corner cases where the only solution would be crafting a special purpose test program to generate stimuli (or sequences of stimuli) which might be very difficult to achieve otherwise (some sort of direct testing and random testing).
I can simply get the spec of the processor and start to classify the requirements and then go one by one trying to build my functional coverage model. It is possible that going through the code would not be needed, even though it might help us discovering corner cases.
Assuming the golden model is provided (I've found one on OVP, yet not sure whether it is the right one!) I'll just verify compliance to the golden model and maybe present some usecases where some high level software is able to run and work without crashing.
The black box approach has some advantages:
OTOH we might face the need to open the box and go deeper with our verification, where interactions between internal elements have to be analyzed.
With the hypothesis that the processor 'state' does not depend on previous instructions (there's no cache), the order of the instructions does not necessarily matter. Should this be the case I'll probably can simply live with throwing random instructions at it.
Al
------------------ You may find this page useful: "In this document I show how to generate code for ARM processor and use it in VHDL or VERILOG simulation.
The flow is from C code or assembly into VERILOG READMEMHEX format. First you need to write a program in C or assembly. ..."
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