Coverage Matrix based Evolutionary Test Program Generation for Microprocessor Verification

Coverage directed test generation is a popular method in the area of functional verification of microprocessor.Existing evolutionary test program generation method can not achieve a good result when applied to complex functional coverage model.This paper proposes a method which divides global functional coverage model into a set of independent coverage sub-model, and then runs the process of coverage matrix based evolutionary test generation for each coverage sub-model.Experimental results on verifying the control dependence coverage model of PKUnity UniCore-2 microprocessor demonstrated that the optimal test programs generated by proposed method achieved 95.11% functional coverage;Comparing to existing method, the functional coverage is increased by 31.03% on average with a 60.4% running time saving.