A Functional Testing Method for Microprocessors

Li Shen, Stephen Y. H. Su

Abstract: A method is presented for functional testing of microprocessors. First, a control fault model at the RTL (register transfer language) level is developed. Based on this model, the authors establish testing requirements for control faults. They present two test procedures to verify the write and read sequences, and use the write and read sequences to test each instruction in the microprocessor. By utilizing k-out-of-m codes, they use fewer tests to cover more faults, thereby reducing the test generation time.<