Mutation Testing is a fault-based software testing technique that has been widely studied for over three decades The literature on Mutation Testing has contributed a set of approaches, tools, developments, and empirical results This paper provides a comprehensive analysis and survey of Mutation Testing The paper also presents the results of several development trend analyses These analyses provide evidence that Mutation Testing techniques and tools are reaching a state of maturity and applicability, while the topic of Mutation Testing itself is the subject of increasing interest

An Analysis and Survey of the Development of Mutation Testing

The Object Management Group's (OMG) Model Driven Architecture (MDA) strategy envisages a world where models play a more direct role in software production, being amenable to manipulation and transformation by machine. Model Driven Engineering (MDE) is wider in scope than MDA. MDE combines process and analysis with architecture. This article sets out a framework for model driven engineering, which can be used as a point of reference for activity in this area. It proposes an organisation of the modelling 'space' and how to locate models in that space. It discusses different kinds of mappings between models. It explains why process and architecture are tightly connected. It discusses the importance and nature of tools. It identifies the need for defining families of languages and transformations, and for developing techniques for generating/configuring tools from such definitions. It concludes with a call to align metamodelling with formal language engineering techniques.

Model Driven Engineering

International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors 2003の要求清浄度について － シリコンウエハ表面と雰囲気環境に要求される清浄度, 分析方法の現状について －

Summary) The abstract should follow the structure of the article (relevance, degree of exploration of the problem, the goal, the main results, conclusion) and characterize the theoretical and practical significance of the study results. The abstract should not contain wording echoing the title, cumbersome grammatical structures and abbreviations. The text should be written in scientific style. The volume of abstracts (summaries) depends on the content of the article, but should not be less than 250 words. All abbreviations must be disclosed in the summary (in spite of the fact that they will be disclosed in the main text of the article), references to the numbers of publications from reference list should not be made. The sentences of the abstract should constitute an integral text, which can be made by use of the words “consequently”, “for example”, “as a result”. Avoid the use of unnecessary introductory phrases (eg, “the author of the article considers...”, “The article presents...” and so on.)

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Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation

IEEE transactions on computer-aided design of integrated circuits and systems : a publication of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society

This paper presents a methodology for sequential logic minimization based on a functional testing approach. A new class of sequentially redundant faults, called functionally redundant, is defined. Such faults are determined by analyzing the functional description of a circuit; their identification and removal is the main topic of the paper. We show that by comparing the gate-level implementation of a circuit with its functional description, it is possible to produce fully testable circuits by spending a fraction of the time usually necessary for applying standard redundancies removal algorithms working at the gate level. >

Sequential logic minimization based on functional testability

Functional verification techniques based on fault injection and simulation at register-transfer level (RTL) have been largely investigated in the past years. Although they have various advantages such as scalability and simplicity, they commonly suffer from the low speed of the cycle-accurate RTL simulation. On the other hand, Transaction-level modeling (TLM) allows a simulation speed sensibly faster than RTL. This article presents FAST, a framework to accelerate RTL fault simulation through automatic RTL-to-TLM abstraction. FAST abstracts RTL models injected with any RTL fault model into equivalent injected TLM models thus allowing a very fast fault simulation at TLM level. The article also presents FAST-DT, a new bit-accurate data type library integrated in the framework that allows a further improvement of the simulation speed-up. Finally, the article shows how the generated TLM test patterns can be automatically synthesized into RTL test patterns by exploiting the structural information of the RTL model extracted during the abstraction process. Experimental results have been performed on several designs of different size and complexity to show the methodology effectiveness.

FAST: An RTL Fault Simulation Framework based on RTL-to-TLM Abstraction

The test problem increasingly affects the system design process and related costs and time to market. Requirements from VLSI/WSI manufacturers are for fast and reliable testability tools, with the possibility of their introduction in early phases of design. The paper presents a global toolset architecture for testability analysis and test pattern generation. Three abstraction levels are considered in this design flow, from the behavioral specifications, through RTL descriptions, down to gate level. In all these phases, VHDL is chosen as the referring description language. The paper then presents an application scenario, detailing the results achieved by the proposed methodology.

Application of a testing framework to VHDL descriptions at different abstraction levels

More and more functional verification is attracting EDA researchers and industrial companies interested in digital system validation. Coverage metrics and functional fault models are used to guide the generation of functional tests achieving high fault coverage in a relatively short time with respect to traditional gate-level ATPGs. However, what is the effectiveness of test sequences generated at functional level with respect to the more traditional gate-level stuck at fault model? The paper presents an accurate analysis of the correlation between the high-level bit coverage fault model and the gate-level stuck-at fault model.

Functional fault coverage: the chamber of secrets or an accurate estimation of gate-level coverage?

Test pattern storage is an important problem affecting all Design for Testability (DfT) techniques based on scan-path. Test compaction is the key idea to reduce this problem, but in case of partial-scan test compaction would concern the concatenation and overlapping of test sequences instead of test vectors. Unfortunately, standard sequential TPGs do not show sufficient capabilities in test sequences compaction. Thus, the paper presents an innovative compaction strategy for test sequences based on implicit techniques. Preliminary results show that the use of the presented technique can sensibly reduce the amount of test patterns which mast be stored and applied.

Franco Fummi

Papers

Sequential logic minimization based on functional testability

FAST: An RTL Fault Simulation Framework based on RTL-to-TLM Abstraction

Application of a testing framework to VHDL descriptions at different abstraction levels

Functional fault coverage: the chamber of secrets or an accurate estimation of gate-level coverage?

Implicit test sequences compaction for decreasing test application cost