Input Stimuli Evolution for RFID Tag Functional Verification

An intricate step in the design process is validating the functionality of a design. As digital designs are getting more complicated, manual generation of efficient input stimuli used for design verification could sometimes get very cumbersome and tedious. In this paper we present a method for fully automatic input stimuli generation, applied in functional verification. The aim is to achieve maximum statement coverage -chosen as our verification metric -in a reasonably short run-time with the smallest input stimulus. Introduction of enhanced protocols in newer RFID standard releases makes the hardware implementation of such systems more elaborated and complex. This will increase demands for advanced methods that are capable of verifying the functionality of RFID systems. The proposed method is based on evolutionary algorithm and uses the RTL model of an RFID tag as well as the syntactical description of applicable commands to the tag. Experimental results show the efficiency of the proposed method.