Smart Simulation Using Collaborative Formal and Simulation Engines

computation and automatic abstraction. Second, Ketchum performs not only automatic test generation but also unreachability analysis, which enables the test generation effort to be focused on coverage states that are not unreachable. Third, the backbone of Ketchum is an off-the-shelf commercial simulator. It enables Ketchum to reach deep states of the design quickly and supports simulation monitors through the standard API of the simulator during test generation. We applied Ketchum to several industrial designs, including the picoJava microprocessor from SUN and the DW8051 microcontroller from Synopsys and obtained very promising results. The experiments show that Ketchum can (1) handle design blocks containing more than 4500 latches and 170K gates, (2) reach up to 6x more coverage states than random simulation and (3) identify a majority of the unreachable coverage states.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: ICCAD
• Authors: Pei-Hsin Ho, Thomas R. Shiple, Kevin Harer, James H. Kukula, Robert F. Damiano, Valeria Bertacco, Jerry Taylor, Jiang Long
• Keywords: Automatic Test Generation, Coverage States, Hardware, ICCAD 2000, Test Generation