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Coverage-Directed Test Generation Automated by Machine Learning -- A Review

Published: 01 January 2012 Publication History

Abstract

The increasing complexity and size of digital designs, in conjunction with the lack of a potent verification methodology that can effectively cope with this trend, continue to inspire engineers and academics in seeking ways to further automate design verification. In an effort to increase performance and to decrease engineering effort, research has turned to artificial intelligence (AI) techniques for effective solutions. The generation of tests for simulation-based verification can be guided by machine-learning techniques. In fact, recent advances demonstrate that embedding machine-learning (ML) techniques into a coverage-directed test generation (CDG) framework can effectively automate the test generation process, making it more effective and less error-prone. This article reviews some of the most promising approaches in this field, aiming to evaluate the approaches and to further stimulate more directed research in this area.

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Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems
ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems  Volume 17, Issue 1
January 2012
224 pages
ISSN:1084-4309
EISSN:1557-7309
DOI:10.1145/2071356
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 01 January 2012
Accepted: 01 September 2011
Revised: 01 April 2011
Received: 01 March 2010
Published in TODAES Volume 17, Issue 1

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Author Tags

  1. Bayesian networks
  2. Coverage-directed test generation (CDG)
  3. Markov models
  4. genetic algorithms
  5. genetic programming
  6. inductive logic programming (ILP)

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