Comprehensive quality control to meet modern system demands
For a manufacturer which aims to sell a billion devices, the quality and reliability of the toolchain used to create its software is as important as the hardware. In fact, developers for the devices will interact more with the toolchain than with the hardware. That is just one of the reasons why it is crucial for the toolchain to be rock-solid, and the compiler and its standard library are its most important ingredients. The SuperTest Compiler Test and Validation Suite provides the quality control that lifts the toolchain to the level that customers deserve.
The second reason is that it cannot be left to the field to find errors in tools. Toolchains created for embedded devices do not have the audience that toolchains for PCs have. Professionals in consumer electronics, embedded and mission-critical industries expect their toolchain to just work, making compiler and library quality control a fundamental requirement.
Thirdly, continuous innovation is needed. Continuous development of the toolchain requires integration of the compiler and library test suites into Continuous Integration pipelines. This is another area where SuperTest shines: it is straightforward to integrate with other tools. Besides text and HTML, it can report in jXML. The test driver comes with an easily extensible Python-based plugin that supports running on the host, on simulators/emulators, and on target hardware. The driver also supports a number of different modes to speed up execution by means of parallelism or overhead reduction.
Fourthly, our test suites are all about standards. Quality control and integration relies on abiding by standards with clear specifications. This has been one of the hallmarks of SuperTest since its inception in 1984, when C was not yet standardized but the process of standardization had begun. Today, SuperTest can be set to verify against the exact version of the C or C++ standard that a market requires, both for the language and for the standard library.
Whether designing off-the-shelf or highly customized hardware, SuperTest is the world’s most comprehensive compiler test, verification, and validation suite for C/C++ compilers and libraries. To bootstrap new compiler development, it includes a code generator trainer, CGtrainer, that provides a suite of almost one thousand tests, divided into 25 levels that progressively test the compiler’s code generator. If the compiler passes that, SuperTest’s extensive suite of tests can be unleashed to check every aspect of compiler quality, including in-depth testing of the target processor’s data model with the calling convention tester and the arithmetic test suite, and verification of the intricate details of the compiler’s inner workings via the optimization test suite.
Any team which supports system builders in mission-critical industries will eventually be asked for evidence that their toolchain conforms to the C and C++ standards. SuperTest is the answer to that question. Solid Sands has helped numerous compiler maintainers get their compiler qualified for use in safety-critical applications. SuperTest provides the required traceability from the language specification to the tests, and vice versa.
It will also facilitate standard library qualification. SuperTest ensures the quality and compliance of the library, while our additional product, SuperGuard, provides the detailed requirements and test specifications that are needed for formal certification.
Learn how leading semiconductor companies use our solutions to ensure quality and safety
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Codasip is a founding member of RISC-V International (formerly the RISC-V Foundation) and in 2015 became the first company to offer a commercial RISC-V IP core.
Japanese semiconductor company ROHM Co., Ltd. was established in 1958 in Kyoto and has since come a long way. The company was named ‘ROHM’ after the letter ‘R’ in its original main product, resistors, plus ‘ohm’, the unit of resistance. In line with the company’s mission of ‘Quality is First’, the R now also stands […]
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