A genetic algorithm-based system for generating test programs for microprocessor IP cores

The current digital systems design trend is quickly moving toward a design-and-reuse paradigm. In particular, intellectual property cores are becoming widely used. Since the cores are usually provided as encrypted gate-level netlist, they raise several testability problems. The authors propose an automatic approach targeting processor cores that, by resorting to genetic algorithms, computes a test program able to attain high fault coverage figures. Preliminary results are reported to assess the effectiveness of our approach with respect to a random approach.