Testing Process Interactions in Embedded Systems

September 20, 2006
2:50 pm - 4:00 pm
Halligan 111
Speaker: Ian Harris, University of California, Irvine
Host: Soha Hassoun

Abstract

All hardware designs depend on structural hierarchy to manage complexity. Each system is constructed as a structural interconnection of a set of components, and it is the interaction of the components which defines the behavior of the system. Hardware verification typically requires over 70% of the total design effort so it is essential that the existing structural hierarchy by leveraged for verification as well. The hierarchical verification problem is divided into unit testing, the verification of individual components, and interaction testing, the verification of the interactions between components. We investigate the problem of interaction testing by defining a coverage metric to estimate the degree to which component interactions have been verified by a given test set. Coverage metrics which evaluate processes separately are unlikely to model the range of design errors which manifest when components are integrated to build a system. A metric which models component interactions is essential to enable verification techniques to scale with growing design complexity. We describe the effectiveness of our metric and results demonstrate that coverage using our metric is computationally tractable.

Ian G. Harris is currently an Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of California Irvine. He received his BS degree in Computer Science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1990. He received his MS and PhD degrees in Computer Science from the University of California San Diego in 1992 and 1997 respectively. He was a member of the faculty in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst from 1997 until June 2003.

His research interests involve the test and validation of hardware and software systems. His current research projects include Hardware/Software Covalidation, and Software Security.

Dr. Harris is an active member of the IEEE Computer Society and he has served on the organizing and program committees of over 12 IEEE conferences and workshops.