Coverage Cookbook Debuts

Verification Academy Adds Major New Technical Resource

The Verification Academy adds another major methodology cookbook to focus on effective coverage adoption.  The Coverage Cookbook describes the different types of coverage that are available to track your verification process progress, how to create a functional coverage model from a specification, and provides examples to implement functional coverage for different types of designs.

Verification Academy “full access” members have access to the free Coverage Cookbook and the UVM/OVM Cookbooks as well.  Are you a registered full access member?  If not, register now to become a full access member.  (Restrictions apply.)

Coverage is not a new topic.  It was one of major additions to the SystemVerilog (IEEE Std. 1800™-2009) standard.  But the SystemVerilog functional coverage extensions were left to the verification engineer to use in such as way to return meaningful measurements of how much of the design specification was being tested.  The Universal Verification Methodology (UVM) offers greater structure for coverage over SystemVerilog, but it too, is still only a piece of the puzzle.

As verification teams have come to generate greater amounts of information from use of SystemVerilog, UVM and other verification tools, the data from the verification runs needs to be easily used to drive coverage closure.  Within the Mentor Graphics Questa verification platform, this resulted in the development of the Unified Coverage Database (UCDB) and associated verification management and planning features.

Since verification teams use a variety of tools and technology from many sources, it was an imperative that verification information could be easily shared and combined to help drive faster coverage closure across the industry.  This is why Mentor Graphics donated its UCDB API to Accellera where it became the Unified Coverage Interoperability Standard (UCIS).

It would be great to think that we are done; but we’re not.  Tools and data are just two dimensions of the three dimensions to any IC design project.  A comprehensive approach to verification management that handles all of this adds the third dimension.  The Mentor Graphics Questa Verification Management features handle all this.

Now the question is how to best adopt and use all the capabilities at hand from the standards to the verification technology at your finger tips.

The Verification Academy Coverage Cookbook is one of the important tools you now have to help pull all the information into a single place where you can learn the theory and put that theory into practice.  The Coverage Cookbook is much like the OVM/UVM Cookbooks in that it is web friendly, while supporting the ability for you to generate a PDF file of the whole document in case you want to have a printed copy or have it available for offline reference.

The Theory section covers:

The Practice section shows three examples you can use today:

The Coverage Cookbook is a live document. You can expect continued extensions and contributions to enhance it.  As Harry Foster, Mentor Graphics’ Chief Scientist Verification put it, “Methodology is the bridge between tools and technologies, which creates a productive, predictable, and repeatable solution.”  We should expect that our collective use of this technology will help hone the methodology which is the heart of the Coverage Cookbook.  And with this use, we should expect the Coverage Cookbook to evolve as we achieve greater verification productivity.

Let us know what you think about the Coverage Cookbook and what we might be able to do to improve it.  In the meantime, Happy Coverage Closing!