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Publication

Maximizing Power State Cross Coverage in Firmware-based Power Management

Vladimir Herdt; Hoang M. Le; Daniel Große; Rolf Drechsler
In: 24th Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference (ASP-DAC). Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference (ASP-DAC-24), 24th, January 21-24, Tokyo, Japan, 2019.

Abstract

Virtual Prototypes (VPs) are becoming increasingly attractive for the early analysis of SoC power management, which is nowadays mostly implemented in firmware (FW). Power and timing constraints can be monitored and validated by executing a set of test-cases in a power-aware FW/VP co-simulation. In this context, cross coverage of power states is an effective but challenging quality metric. This paper proposes a novel coverage-driven approach to automatically generate test-cases maximizing this cross coverage. In particular, we integrate a coverage-loop that successively refines the generation process based on previous results. We demonstrate our approach on a LEON3-based VP.