Overview

Coverage-guided Aging is a coverage-driven technique for cross-level processor verification based on endless randomized instruction stream generation. The approach uses functional coverage feedback to guide test generation over time rather than relying only on unconstrained randomized instruction streams.

In the described cross-level setup, separate random instruction generators are initialized with the same cryptographic seeds for each core, causing them to provide the same endless randomized instruction stream. The instruction-set simulator (ISS) first executes part of the stream, while the RTL processor later fetches its stream through a core adapter that accounts for micro-architectural effects such as pipelining, prefetching, and fetch buffering.