Intelligent interleaving of scenarios: A novel approach to system level test generation

Abstract

Parallelism in system architecture and design imposes a verification challenge as the exponential growth in the number of execution combinations becomes unwieldy. We report on a method for system-level test case generation. This method relies on dynamic interleaving of scenarios from the core level or sub-system level. We discuss the relevance of this method for the system level. We also describe a tool that implements this method and show how it was used in IBM for system verification of the Xbox 360 chip and Power Management in the Cell processor, as well as verification of the pSeries eServers. We claim that this method shortened the system level verification cycle and allowed reuse in and across projects, which led to exposure of system-level bugs in a relatively short time. Copyright 2007 ACM.