An observability measure to enhance statement coverage metric for proper evaluation of verification completeness

Abstract

Simulation based validation approaches are still the primary workhorse for solving the verification problem of getting the initial HDL description correct, especially for large scaled designs. However, most of existing code coverage metrics do not address obsevability issue [2]. Therefore, we intend to provide additional observability measures to statement coverage metric for more proper and realistic evaluation of verification completeness for a HDL design. As compared to OCCOM [1,2,3], our approach estimates a real probabilistic likelihood of propagating erroneous effects without any unreasonable assumptions and can always provide lower bound estimation.