Title
RTL Functional Verification Using Excitation and Observation Coverage
Abstract
Code-level coverage is often used to measure RTL-level verification progress. However, a simple code-level coverage inaccurately estimates the verification result by considering only the excitations of functional blocks. A coverage measure that considers additional verification qualities, such as conditions checking or observation, can significantly extend the verification accuracy. However, identifying a design error becomes increasingly difficult as design complexity increases. This paper presents heuristic approaches that increase the chance of detecting obvious-but-easily-missed design errors by allowing a designer/verification-engineer to define additional condition states to be checked. The verification approach is implemented using Verilog Programming Language Interface (PLI) and several benchmark circuits are analyzed. The results indicate a high correlation between actual error(design mutant) detection rate and the proposed coverage measure. The proposed coverage enhances verification performance with less user interaction, fast coverage calculation, and with less system overhead.
Year
DOI
Venue
2001
10.1109/HLDVT.2001.972808
Monterey, CA
Keywords
Field
DocType
proposed coverage measure,fast coverage calculation,additional verification quality,rtl-level verification progress,rtl functional verification,simple code-level coverage,observation coverage,verification approach,code-level coverage,verification accuracy,proposed coverage,coverage measure,functional verification,formal verification,hardware description languages,computer languages,error correction,observation,programming language,testing,high level synthesis,face detection,circuit analysis
Functional verification,Intelligent verification,Computer science,Runtime verification,Real-time computing,Theoretical computer science,Verilog,High-level verification,Modified condition/decision coverage,Formal verification,Hardware description language
Conference
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
0-7695-1411-1
0
0.34
References 
Authors
10
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Byeong Min1335.60
Gwan Choi236956.66