Automated Coverage Directed Test Generation Using a Cell-Based Genetic Algorithm
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Functional verification is a major challenge in the hardware design development cycle. Defining the appropriate coverage points that capture the design's functionalities is a non-trivial problem. However, the real bottleneck remains in generating the suitable testbenches that activate those coverage points adequately. In this paper, we propose an approach to enhance the coverage rate of multiple coverage points through the automatic generation of appropriate test patterns. We employ a directed random simulation, where directives are continuously updated until achieving acceptable coverage rates for all coverage points. We propose to model the solution of the test generation problem as sequences of directives or cells, each of them with specific width, height and distribution. Our approach is based on a genetic algorithm, which automatically optimizes the widths, heights and distributions of these cells over the whole input domain with the aim of enhancing the effectiveness of test generation. We illustrate the efficiency of our approach on a set of designs modeled in SystemC
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it