Structural Code Coverage on the AURIX™ TC4x PPU – Without Host-Based Execution

March 03, 2026

Together with TASKING, we implemented a simulation-based coverage workflow that runs PPU unit tests directly on the final machine code.
Because the PPU uses a Vector-C dialect with SIMD instructions, classic host-based tools like gcov or llvm-cov are not applicable.

Our approach:

Execution of each test in the Synopsys ARC nSIM simulator
Compilation with TASKING SmartCode
Automated workflow:
- Generate per test coverage based on trace files from the simulator
- Merge all results into project coverage
- Generate an HTML report
Non-intrusive (no instrumentation)
CI-compatible HTML reports for ASPICE/ISO 26262 reviews

This ensures target-accurate, automatable, and safety-compliant coverage for vectorized PPU code.