Test of peripheral modules has not yet been deeply investigated by the research community. When embedded in a system on a chip, peripheral cores introduce new issues for post-production testing. A peripheral core embedded in a SoC requires a test set able to properly perform two different tasks: configure the device in different operation modes and properly exercise it. In this paper an automatic approach able to generate test sets for peripheral cores embedded in a SoC is described. The presented approach is based on an evolutionary algorithm that exploits high-level simulation and gathers coverage metrics information to produce the test sets. The method compares favorably with results obtained by hand.