Automatic extraction of assertions from execution traces of behavioural models

Several approaches exist for specification mining of hardware designs. Most of them work at RTL and they extract assertions in the form of temporal relations between Boolean variables. Other approaches work at system level (e.g., TLM) to mine assertions that specify the behaviour of the communication protocol. However, these techniques do not generate assertions addressing the design functionality. Thus, there is a lack of studies related to the automatic mining of assertions for capturing the functionality of behavioural models, where logic expressions among more abstracted (e.g., numeric) variables than bits and bit vectors are necessary.This paper is intended to fill in the gap, by proposing a tool for automatic extraction of temporal assertions from execution traces of behavioural models by adopting a mix of static and dynamic techniques.