Subject: Re: Coverage API requirements
From: Joao Geada (Joao.Geada@synopsys.com)
Date: Mon Aug 19 2002 - 16:25:08 PDT
> Thanks for the detailed requirements. Looks good.
Hi Alain. Thanks for the comments.
> I have a couple of comments/questions:
>
> 1) should we add something about merging tests? Usually, one simulation
> will not get you full coverage on everything, but your set of tests
> (also called regression suite) hopefully will. From an customer point of
> view, I want to query the "coverage results" of the entire suite and
> find the weaknesses. I guess it would make sense to standardize such
> queries, including ways to manipulate the test list, determine which
> subset of tests would provide for "good enough" coverage and so on. On
> the other hand, this contradicts the usual view that the API is running
> "live" with a simulation which is only one test at a time.
You're correct that coverage is different from most other APIs in that full information
does not typically come from a single simulation but is instead an
aggregate of many simulation runs. This is an area that often is not
part of the simulation API but is specific to a given coverage toolset.
I am not sure how this fits within the tasks defined for this committee. Yatin ?
> 2) coverage and assertions: in the long term, I am a proponent of
> functional coverage, for which I believe assertions can be of great
> help. In your requirements, I would therefore emphasize point 1) even
> more: not only should the API be very similar for different kinds of
> coverage, but could we make it independent of the underlying coverage
> metrics? This way, I could query coverage results from any coverage
> tool, whether it is line coverage, FSM coverage, or some new functional
> coverage metric that we didn't even think of at the time this standard
> was defined.
Assertion coverage should definitely be part of the minimum coverage types
listed in section 2. I was an oversight not to have included it.
Add item 2.6- assertion coverage
Joao
==============================================================================
Joao Geada, PhD Sr. Staff R&D Engineer Verif Tech Group
Synopsys, Inc TEL: (508) 263-8083
154 Crane Meadow Road, Suite 300, FAX: (508) 263-8069
Marlboro, MA 01752, USA
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