Accelerating microprocessor silicon validation by exposing ISA diversity
Nikos Foutris, Dimitris Gizopoulos, Mihalis Psarakis, Xavier Vera, Antonio M. González · 2011
Microprocessor design validation is a time consuming and costly task that tends to be a bottleneck in the release of new architectures. The validation step that detects the vast majority of design bugs is the one that stresses the silicon prototypes by applying huge numbers of random tests. Despite its bug detection capability, this step is constrained by extreme computing needs for random tests simulation to extract the bug-free memory image for comparison with the actual silicon image.