Systematic Testing of Hardware Compilers: Testing the DWARV C-to-VHDL Compiler

DWARV is a C-to-VHDL compiler which can compile arbitrary C programs for a heterogeneous platform with minimal effort. Depending on the application this will imply faster execution. We give an overview of C-to-VHDL compilers. One important aspect of all software is its reliability, and we aim to assess DWARV’s reliability and the adequacy of its test suite. Based on the identified shortcomings of the test suite, we implement the test result framework Dummy. We explore some of the additional possibilities created by the usage of Dummy, and provide a plan to improve DWARV’s test suite. We conclude with an analysis of the results that show the advantages of the implemented test framework and proposed test plan.Microelectronics & Computer EngineeringElectrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Scienc