Coverage-Driven Stimuli Generation

Simulation-based verification is still one of the most important methods to validate the correctness of System-on-Chips. Here, explicitly specified stimuli need to be generated which trigger certain scenarios of the design. However, so far stimuli generation is mainly performed independently of the desired coverage. In this work, we propose approaches for coverage-driven stimuli generation. Despite a naive method, we introduce and discuss automatic and interactive methods for an improved stimuli generation. We show that explicitly considering coverage metrics leads to smaller and complete sets of stimuli.