Overview
The demand for high performance hardware systems with limited power consumption is increasing the complexity of their design and architecture. Modern architectures are heterogeneous by nature and include many cores, general purpose and special purpose processors, accelerators, and complex IO adapters and interconnects. This ever-increasing complexity imposes an extremely difficult challenge on verification, which consumes up to 70% of the design effort. Verification at the system level is commonly done by generating tests/stimuli and feeding them to a VHDL simulation, thus exercising the different components. The lack of simulation resources has led to a need for high-quality tests.
X-Gen is a model based random test program generator, oriented at the system level. X-Gen's main goals include:
- Moving some of the effort required to generate quality tests from the user into the tool. To enable this, X-Gen is given a model of the system, from which it derives an understanding of 'quality tests'.
- Coping with a large variety of systems, with different characteristics, ranging from Integrated Systems On a Chip to very large computer systems.
X-Gen is developed by HRL, in cooperation with the system simulation groups in different IBM sites (Austin, Rochester, Raleigh, Boeblingen, Bangalore). X-Gen was successfully used for the verification of a large variety of system designs ranging from gaming consoles (MS X-Box and Sony PS/3) to very large, high-end, computer systems used by enterprises such as pSeries (the leading UNIX server) and zSeries (the leading mainframe computer).