Evaluation of an efficient control-oriented coverage metric

Dynamic verification, the use of simulation to determine design correctness, is widely used due to its tractability for large designs. A serious limitation of dynamic techniques is the difficulty in determining whether or not a test sequence is sufficient to detect all likely design errors. Coverage metrics are used to address this problem by providing a set of goals to be achieved during the simulation process; if all coverage goals are satisfied then the test sequence is assumed to be complete. Many coverage metrics have been proposed but no effort has been made to identify a correlation between existing metrics and design quality. In this paper we present a technique to evaluate a coverage metric by examining its ability to ensure the detection of real design errors. We apply our evaluation technique to our control-oriented coverage metric to verify its ability to reveal design errors.