Test generation for hardware-software covalidation using non-linear programming

Hardware-software covalidation involves the cosimulation of a system description with a functional test sequence. Functional test generation is heavily dependent on manual interaction, making it a time-consuming and expensive process. We present an automatic test generation technique to detect design errors in hardware-software systems. The design errors targeted are those caused by incorrect synchronization between concurrent tasks/processes whose detection is dependent on event timing. We formulate the test generation problem as a nonlinear program on integer variables and we use a public domain finite domain solver to solve the problem. We present the formulation and show the results of test generation for a number of potential design errors.