Determining Cases of Scenarios to Improve Coverage in Simulation-based Verification

Abstract—Functional verification of complex designs is still dominated by simulation-based approaches. In particular, Coverage-driven Verification (CDV) is well acknowledged and ap-plied in industry. Here, verification gaps in terms of inadequately checked scenarios are addressed and closed by generating and applying dedicated stimuli. In order to ensure a good coverage and, by this, a high verification quality, each scenario is supposed to become sufficiently triggered. However, the considered scenario may be triggered in several fashions and information about that is hardly available in the existing CDV approaches. In this work, we propose an approach which automatically derives this information. Examples and experimental evaluations illustrate how this improves coverage in simulation-based verification. I