Honorable Mention Award

Functional coverage is a key metric for establishing the overall completeness of a verification process; however, empirical evidence suggests that coverage models are often inaccurate, misleading and incomplete. This paper proposes that such coverage defects are extremely common and since coverage analysis tends to focus on holes, or missing coverage, rather than the accuracy of what is already reported, then this represents a significant risk to the overall quality of the verification process. After a generic introduction to the problem the paper discusses practical examples and proposes pragmatic solutions for minimizing the risk and improving quality. Finally we demonstrate a novel application of the UCIS API to cross-reference different aspects of functional coverage in order to validate correctness of the model under some circumstances.

( Mark Litterick )