Minimal Stimuli Generation in Simulation-based Verification

Simulation-based verification is still the state-of-the-art when checking the correctness of complex Systems-on-Chips. In particular, constraint-based simulation is popular, since here dedicated stimuli are generated which trigger certain corner-case behavior. However, to the best of our knowledge, only heuristic methods have been introduced so far. In this paper, we propose an approach that determines a minimal set of stimuli for the desired set of scenarios to be simulated. For this purpose, we are making use of solving techniques from Boolean satisfiability. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that the proposed approach can be applied to generate very compact stimuli sets. Furthermore, the proposed approach can be used to evaluate the quality of results obtained by heuristic methods.