Testing ThumbPod: Softcore bugs are hard to find

Author

Schaumont, P. ; Sakiyama, K. ; Fan, Y. ; Hwang, D. ; Yang, S. ; Hodjat, A. ; Lai, B. ; Verbauwhede, I.

Author_Institution

Dept. of Electr. Eng., California Univ., Los Angeles, CA, USA

fYear

2003

fDate

12-14 Nov. 2003

Firstpage

77

Lastpage

82

Abstract

We present the debug and test strategies used in the ThumbPod system for Embedded Fingerprint Authentication. ThumbPod uses multiple levels of programming (Java, C and hardware) with a hierarchy of programmable architectures (KVM on top of a SPARC core on top of an FPGA). The ThumbPod project teamed up seven graduate students in the concurrent development and verification of all these programming layers. We pay special attention to the strengths and weaknesses of our bottom-up testing approach.

Keywords

Java; divide and conquer methods; embedded systems; fingerprint identification; hardware description languages; program debugging; programming environments; virtual machines; Java programming; ThumbPod system; biometrically secure key; bottom-up testing; concurrent development; concurrent verification; coprocessors; debug strategies; dedicated VHDL coding; divide-and-conquer strategy; embedded context; embedded fingerprint authentication; latent fingerprint image; multiple levels of programming; programmable architectures; softcore bugs; system-level context; virtual machine; Biosensors; Computer bugs; Cryptography; Data security; Field programmable gate arrays; Fingerprint recognition; Java; Power system security; Protocols; Testing;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

High-Level Design Validation and Test Workshop, 2003. Eighth IEEE International

Conference_Location

San Francisco, CA, USA

Print_ISBN

0-7803-8236-6

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/HLDVT.2003.1252478

Filename

1252478