New evolutionary techniques for test-program generation for complex microprocessor cores

Checking if microprocessor cores are fully functional at the end of the productive process has become a major issue. Traditional functional approaches are not sufficient when considering modern designs. This paper describes new improvements for an existing evolutionary algorithm, called µGP, able to generate Turing-complete programs; these are exploited, along with hardware acceleration techniques, to add content to a qualifying test campaign by automatically generating assembly programs. The approach is suitable for medium-sized processor cores. The experimental evaluation performed on a SPARCv8 clearly shows the potentiality of the approach, and the effectiveness of the enhancements to the evolutionary core.