Abstract
This paper is concerned with the task of ‘stress testing’an integrated circuit in its operational environment with the goal of identifying any circumstances under which the circuit might suffer from performance issues. Previous attempts to use simple hill-climbing algorithms to automate the generation of tests have faltered because the behaviour of the circuits can be subject to non-determinism, with a search space that can give rise to local maxima. In this paper we seek to work around these problems by experimenting with different search algorithms which ought to be better at handling such search-space properties (random-restart hill-climbing and simulated annealing). We evaluate these enhancements by applying the approach to test the Arm Cache Coherent Interconnect Unit (CCI) on a new 64-bit development platform, and show that both simulated annealing and random-restart hill-climbing outperforms simple hill-climbing algorithm.
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Notes
- 1.
All references of ‘Juno’ would imply R0 variant of the board in the rest of the paper.
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Eljuse, B., Walkinshaw, N. (2018). Comparison of Search-Based Algorithms for Stress-Testing Integrated Circuits. In: Colanzi, T., McMinn, P. (eds) Search-Based Software Engineering. SSBSE 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11036. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99241-9_10
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