A novel approach for functional coverage measurement in HDL

Abstract

While the coverage-driven functional verification is getting popular: a fast and convenient coverage measurement tool is necessary. In this paper, we propose a hovel approach for functional coverage measurement based on the VCD files produced by the simulators. The usage flow of the proposed dumpfile-based coverage analysis is much easier and smoother than that of existing instrumentation-based coverage tools. No pre-processing tool is required and no extra code will be inserted into the source code. Most importantly, the flexibility in choosing coverage metrics and measured code regions is increased. Only one simulation run is needed for any kind of coverage reports. By conducting some experiments on real examples: it shows very promising results in terms of the performance and the accuracy of coverage reports.