Co-evolution of test programs and stimuli vectors for testing of embedded peripheral cores

Research community has not investigated as deeply as necessary the test generation problem of peripheral modules inside a system-on-a-chip (SoC), yet. Testing process for a peripheral core requires two distinct but highly correlated tasks: peripheral configuration and peripheral exercising. The configuration task is usually performed by an assembly program executed by the microprocessor within the SoC; whereas peripheral exercising directly concerns to the use of the device, which may be activated by both the executed program and a carefully devised set of external stimuli. When embedded in a SoC, peripheral cores introduce new issues for their testing. In this paper an automatic approach able to co- evolve assembly programs and stimuli sets for peripheral cores embedded in a SoC is described. The presented approach is based on an evolutionary algorithm that exploits high-level simulation and gathers coverage metrics information to produce the test sets. The proposed method considerably reduces the required efforts to produce a suitable test set with respect to the previous approaches, broadening its applicability and increasing its usefulness.