An Endeavor to Industrialize Hardware Fuzzing: Automating NoC Verification in UVM

We endeavor to make hardware fuzzing compatible with the standard IC development process and apply that to NoC verification in a real-world industrial environment. We systematically employ fuzzing throughout the entire NoC verification process, including router verification, network verification, and stress testing. As a case study, we apply our approach to an open-source NoC component in OpenPiton. Remarkably, our fuzzing methods automatically achieved complete code and functional coverage in the router and mesh network, and effectively detect injected starvation bugs. The evaluation results clearly demonstrate the practicability of our fuzzing approach to considerably reduce the manpower required for test case generation compared with traditional NoC verification.