On the Reuse of TLM Mutation Analysis at RTL

Mutation analysis has gained consensus during the last decades as being an efficient technique for measuring the quality of SW testbench. More recently, it has been efficiently applied for validating testbenches of embedded system models implemented in hardware description language (HDL) at different abstraction levels (i.e., RTL, TLM). This article analyzes how mutation analysis performed at TLM can be reused at RTL and, in particular, how such a reuse can help designers in (i) optimizing the time spent for simulation at RTL, and (ii) improving the RTL testbench quality. Two alternatives of TLM mutation analysis reuse are presented and investigated for proposing an efficient methodology of RTL mutation analysis. Through experimental results, the proposed methodology is compared to the standard RTL mutation analysis to confirm its efficiency in terms of both simulation time and reached mutation coverage.