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 hardwaresoftware 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 non-linear 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.