Survey of Methods for Functional Online Testing of Microprocessors
https://doi.org/10.15514/ISPRAS-2021-33(6)-9
Abstract
Online testing is a process of functional verification of microprocessors produced in silicon or their FPGA-prototypes, i.e. post-silicon verification. This type of testing differs both from the manufacturing testing, aimed at checking the workability of manufactured chips (e.g., absence of physical defects, admissibility of physical characteristics) and from simulation-based pre-silicon functional verification of microprocessors models (where internal microprocessor signals are available for observing, and the execution process can be controlled). Post-silicon verification enables to rapidly run huge numbers of tests and detect bugs missed during pre-silicon functional verification. Tests for microprocessors are usually represented by executable programs. Accordingly, the main tasks of online testing are high-performance generation of test programs in the given ISA and creation of a test environment responsible for launching programs, assessing the correctness of their execution by a microprocessor, diagnosing errors, and interacting with the outside world. This paper examines the problems arising in the development of online testing systems (online test program generators), reviews existing solutions in this area, and, on the base on them, proposes a promising approach to organizing online testing.
About the Authors
Nikita Dmitrievich CHERTOK
Ivannikov Institute for System Programming of the Russian Academy of Sciences
Russian Federation
Russian Federation
PhD student and researcher at the Software Engineering Department of ISP RAS
Mikhail Mikhaylovich CHUPILKO
Ivannikov Institute for System Programming of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Plekhanov Russian University of Economics
Russian Federation
Russian Federation
PhD in Physics and Mathematics, Senior Researcher at the Software Engineering Department of ISP RAS, Senior Researcher at the Heterogeneous Computing Systems research lab of Plekhanov RUE
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Review
For citations:
CHERTOK N.D., CHUPILKO M.M. Survey of Methods for Functional Online Testing of Microprocessors. Proceedings of the Institute for System Programming of the RAS (Proceedings of ISP RAS). 2021;33(6):131-148. (In Russ.) https://doi.org/10.15514/ISPRAS-2021-33(6)-9
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