Testing a procedural interface for conformance to a standard

Abstract

Procedural interface testing is a complex task since it requires in-depth knowledge in more than one domain. In particular, testing procedural interfaces (PI) to HDL simulators require knowledge of both programming and HDL modeling. This paper describes a methodology to automatically generate a test suite from a formal model specification of a HDL procedural interface. Since this test program is generated automatically from the formal model, it is correct by construction. Therefore an error encountered during the testing indicates either a problem in the PI implementation or in the formal model specification.