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Virginia Tech

RTL Functional Test Generation Using Factored Concolic Execution

Abstract

dc:description.abstract

This thesis presents a novel concolic testing methodology and CORT, a test generation framework that uses it for high-level functional test generation. The test generation effort is visualized as the systematic unraveling of the control-flow response of the design over multiple (factored) explorations. We begin by transforming the Register Transfer Level (RTL) source for the design into a high-performance C++ compiled functional simulator which is instrumented for branch coverage. An exploration begins by simulating the design with concrete stimuli. Then, we perform an interleaved cycle-by-cycle symbolic evaluation over the concrete execution trace extracted from the Control Flow Graph (CFG) of the design. The purpose of this task is to dynamically discover means to divert the control flow of the system, by mutating primary-input stimulated control statements in this trace. We record the control-flow response as a Test Decision Tree (TDT), a new representation for the test generation effort. Successive explorations begin at system states heuristically selected from a global TDT, onto which each new decision tree resultant from an exploration is stitched. CORT succeeds at constructing functional tests for ITC99 and IWLS-2005 benchmarks that achieve high branch coverage using the fewest number of input vectors, faster than existing methods. Furthermore, we achieve orders of magnitude speedup compared to previous hybrid concrete and symbolic simulation based techniques.

Degree

thesis:*
Name thesis:degree_name
Master of Science
Level thesis:degree_level
masters
Discipline thesis:degree_discipline
Computer Engineering
Department dc:contributor.department
Electrical and Computer Engineering
Grantor dc:publisher
Virginia Tech
Year dc:date.issued
2017

Author and committee

dc:creator, dc:contributor.*
Author dc:creator
  • Pinto, Sonal
Chair dc:contributor.committeechair
  • Hsiao, Michael S.
Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember
  • Schaumont, Patrick R.
  • Zeng, Haibo

Subjects

dc:subject × 5

Rights

dc:rights
Statement dc:rights
  • In Copyright

Identifiers

dc:identifier.*
Dc Identifier Other
vt_gsexam:10351
OAI identifier oai:identifier
oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/78397

Chain of custody

source
Harvested from
Virginia Tech
Base URL
vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/oai/request
Last updated
2026-07-22
Source record
OAI-PMH GetRecord
citation

Pinto, Sonal. RTL Functional Test Generation Using Factored Concolic Execution. masters thesis, Virginia Tech, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/10919/78397