A two-level approach to automated conformance testing of VHDL designs

For manufacturers of consumer electronics, conformance testing of embedded software is a vital issue. To improve performance, parts of this software are implemented in hardware, often designed in the Hardware Description Language VHDL. Conformance testing is a time consuming and error-prone process. Thus automating (parts of) this process is essential. There are many tools for test generation and for VHDL simulation. However, most test generation tools operate on a high level of abstraction and applying the generated tests to a VHDL design is a complicated task. For each specific case one can build a layer of dedicated circuitry and/or software that performs this task. It appears that the ad-hoc nature of this layer forms the bottleneck of the testing process. We propose a {em generic solution for bridging this gap: a generic layer of software dedicated to interface with VHDL implementations. It consists of a number of Von Neumann-like components that can be instantiated for each specific VHDL design. This paper reports on the construction of and some initial experiences with a concrete tool environment based on these principles.