A Coverage Metric for the Validation of Interacting Processes

We present a coverage metric which evaluates the testing of a set of interacting concurrent processes. Existing behavioral coverage metrics focus almost exclusively on the testing of individual processes. However the vast majority of practical hardware descriptions are composed of many processes which must correctly interact to implement the system. Coverage metrics which evaluate processes separately are unlikely to model the range of design errors which manifest themselves when components are integrated to build a system. A metric which models component interactions is essential to enable validation techniques to scale with growing design complexity. We describe the effectiveness of our metric and provide results to demonstrate that coverage computation using our metric is tractable