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1   Introduction

1.1  What is Covered?

Covered is a Verilog code coverage analysis tool that can be useful for determining how well a diagnostic test suite is covering the design under test (DUT). It is command-line based with an optional Tcl/Tk GUI report viewer, making it portable across almost all platforms.

1.2  What can code coverage do?

Typically, in the design verification work flow, a design verification engineer will develop a self-checking test suite to verify design elements/functions specified by a design's specification document. When the test suite contains all of the tests required by the design specification, the test writer may ask:

• "How much logic in the design is actually being exercised?"
• "Does my test suite cover all of the DUT?"
• "Am I done writing tests for the logic?"

When the design verification gets to this point, it is often useful to get some metrics for determining logic coverage. This is where a code coverage utility, such as Covered, is very useful.

The metrics obtained by using a code coverage analysis tool can be very useful for determining the following about a design and the test suite testing that design:

1. Completeness of the test suite in terms of logic coverage.
2. Unexercised logic in the design (useful in helping to determine what types of tests need to be added to the test suite).
3. Corner cases in design that are untestable.

1.3  What can't code coverage do?

It is important to note that any code coverage tool is only useful in indicating how much logic is being covered by a test suite. It does not indicate that the covered logic works appropriately. This, of course, can only be verified by the diagnostics themselves.

Additionally, it is possible that two or more diagnostics can achieve the same coverage and yet be functionally testing different characteristics of a design. Since the coverage metrics are not improved in this case, one may conclude that the second test is unnecessary. This may or may not be true depending on what is being tested; it is always up to the test writer to determine the necessity of a diagnostic. Using the code coverage tool results as the sole means of making this determination is not recommended. Use common sense in these areas.

1.4  What does Covered do?

Covered is a tool that uses your design files along with standard VCD or LXT dump files to analyze the code coverage of the DUT. The code coverage information is stored in a special database file that can be retrieved and "merged" with new coverage information to create a summed coverage total for several tests. After a database file has been created, the user may generate various ASCII reports that summarize the coverage information or run Covered's GUI to interactively analyze the coverage information.

1.5  What does Covered NOT do?

Though Covered does perform some resimulation of the design to derive line, combinational logic, memory, and assertion coverage, Covered is NOT a full-fledged compiler/simulator and should not be used for such purposes. Additionally, Covered is NOT a linting tool. Many syntax/semantic issues that are not allowed by the LRM are allowed by Covered for purposes of making Covered's core more generic and/or simplistic. Please make sure that your code is properly linted in your design flow using an appropriate tool.

1.6  What makes Covered different?

Most Verilog code coverage tools perform a pre-compilation procedure known as instrumenting. During this procedure, the coverage tool will read in the DUT and generate its own version of the DUT with additional code added to aid in calculating coverage after the simulation is complete. The benefits to this style are higher performance of the coverage tool when it is run after the simulation. The drawbacks to this approach are that it slows down simulation speed and a trust issue that the coverage tool did not alter your simulation model when it performed the instrumentation.

Covered, on the other hand, omits the instrumenting procedure all-together and only performs its analysis on a pre-simulated design. This means that Covered cannot make a mistake to your simulation and the simulation is allowed to run faster since there is no additional code that must be run to get coverage data. The drawback is that there is some overhead in post-simulation for extracting coverage data but this is typically less than the simulation overhead in the other method.

Additionally, unlike all other commercial coverage tools, Covered is free! No license managers to invoke and maintain. No licensing fees and negotiations. The only thing the developers of Covered want in return are bug reports and user input. Isn't the open source life grand?!

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