Using a constraint satisfaction formulation and solution techniques for random test program generation

Automatic generation of test programs plays a major role in the verification of modern processors and hardware systems. In this paper, we formulate the generation of test programs as a constraint satisfaction problem and develop techniques for dealing with the challenges we face, most notably: huge variable domains (e.g., magnitude of 2
⁶⁴
) and the need to randomly generate “well distributed” samplings of the solution space. We describe several applications of our method, which include specific test generators targeted at various parts of a design or stages of the verification process.