Mutation-analysis driven functional verification of a soft microprocessor

This paper proposes a quality driven, simulation based approach to functional design verification, which applies mainly to IP-level HDL designs with well specified test instruction format and is evaluated on a soft microprocessor core MB-LITE [5]. The approach utilizes mutation analysis as the quality metric to steer an automated simulation data generation process. It leads to a simulation flow with two phases towards an enhanced mutation analysis result. First in a random simulation phase, an in-loop heuristics is deployed and adjusts dynamically the test probability distribution so as to improve the coverage efficiency. Next, for each remaining hard-to-kill mutant, a search heuristics on test input space is developed to iteratively locate a target test, using a specific objective cost function for the goal of killing HDL mutant. The effectiveness of this integrated two-phase simulation flow is demonstrated by the results with the MB-LITE microprocessor IP.