A framework for the validation of processor architecture compliance

Abstract

We present a framework for validating the compliance of a design with a given architecture. Our approach is centered on the concept of misinterpretations. These include missing behavior, wrong understanding of a behavior, or confusion with similar behavior described in the architecture or elsewhere. We formally capture the architecture behavior in the form of flowcharts and automatically derive a list of architecture misinterpretations from these flowcharts. These misinterpretations constitute the backbone of coverage models targeted by a suite of tests. The suite is automatically generated by a model-based test case generator. A compliance validation system based on these principles has been developed and used in two actual industrial processes of checking compliance with the PowerPC architecture. Copyright 2007 ACM.