Automaton: an autonomous coverage-based multiprocessor system verification environment

The number of computation cycles used for simulation-based verification of multiprocessor systems is the available throughput of simulation. This paper presents Automaton, a verification framework for multiprocessor systems based on the state-space coverage of interacting state machines in the system components. Automaton provides focused verification of those components and minimizes the demand on computing resources while ensuring improved verification coverage at the system level. Automaton makes use of a coverage-based directed-random simulation approach employing a network of workstations. The overall result is a more thorough and efficient system-level verification with a given simulation resource.