Extensive testing of floating point unit

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of developing test programs for IEEE-754 and Intel x87-compliant floating point units (FPUs). Exhaustive testing is assured by a balanced mixture of pseudorandom, fault and application-oriented instruction sequences. Special tools have been used to manage the test monitoring and to optimize the fault coverage. Their usefulness was illustrated with experimental results. Some data related to the cost (in time and RAM space) of the developed tests are presented.