´Dump What You Need´ - A Coverage Methodology to Accelerate SoC Verification

Code Coverage is a method used to gauge the effectiveness of a Test setup for a particular Design. Even with the advent of modern techniques like Functional Coverage, Code Coverage still remains an important cog in the wheel of SoC Verification cycle. Through Code Coverage, Design and Verification Engineers get to know about parts of code excited by the Test stimulus and more importantly, parts of code which have not been exercised. Code Coverage for SoC is usually a long pole in the Verification cycle typically because of huge Simulator Compile and Run times. The paper discusses the traditional SoC Coverage closure methodology and proposes an automated methodology to efficiently manage the Coverage enabled Simulation runs.