Guided lightweight Software test qualification for IP integration using Virtual Prototypes

Software-Driven Verification (SDV) has the promise to significantly reduce the overall time and effort for the task of IP integration and verification. With the help of SystemC Virtual Prototypes (VPs), SW tests to verify the (new) integrated IP blocks and the HW/SW integration can be developed in an early design stage and reused in the subsequent steps. However, the crucial question regarding the quality of these tests has not been considered so far. For this purpose, we propose in this paper a novel quality-driven methodology based on mutation analysis. By elevating the main concepts of mutation-based qualification to the context of SDV, our methodology is capable to detect serious quality issues in the SW tests. At its heart is a novel consistency analysis, that measures the coverage of the IP in HW/SW co-simulation in a lightweight fashion and relates this coverage to the SW test results to provide clear feedback on how to further improve the quality of tests. We provide two case studies on real-world VPs and SW tests to demonstrate the applicability and efficacy of our methodology.