Domain coverage metric for validation

The importance of validation continues to grow with the increase of design size. How to measure the completeness and quality of validation approach? Existing coverage metrics are oversimplified and incapable to reveal design faults, so we proposed and developed an innovative coverage metric, domain coverage metric. Domain methodology is based on a geometrical analysis of the domain boundary and takes advantage of the fact that points on or near the boundary are most sensitive to domain errors. The coverage tool have been implemented using Verilog procedural interface (VPI) and have been applied to validation of industrial system on chip (SoC) under design. Results show that the domain coverage can detect many design faults that statement and path coverage can not