Accellera Systems Initiative is an independent, not-for profit organization dedicated to create, support, promote, and advance system-level design, modeling, and verification standards for use by the worldwide electronics industry. We are composed of a broad range of members that fully support the work of our technical committee to develop technology standards that are balanced, open, and benefit the worldwide electronics industry. Leading companies and semiconductor manufacturers around the world are using our electronic design automation (EDA) and intellectual property (IP) standards in a wide range of projects in numerous application areas to develop consumer, mobile, wireless, automotive, and other “smart” electronic devices. Through an ongoing partnership with the IEEE, standards and technical implementations developed by Accellera Systems Initiative are contributed to the IEEE for formal standardization and ongoing governance.

1062: Tackling Missing Bins: Refining Functional Coverage In Systemverilog For Deterministic Coverage Closure

Tuesday, March 5, 2024 9:00 am — 11:00 am

In the context of hardware design verification, defining function coverage accurately in SystemVerilog remains a challenge, largely due to human errors leading to "missing coverbins". This paper introduces a methodology aimed at enhancing function coverage by identifying these overlooked bins. By treating coverbins as a SystemVerilog queue and employing an "waive function", this approach provides verification engineers a mechanism to efficiently determine whether sampled cover point already accounted for in the coverage. Experimental validation, involving the CacheManager in an SSD Controller, underscored the method's efficacy, with results revealing a significant 16.4% improvement in functional coverage. Thus, the proposed method not only rectifies human-induced inaccuracies but also improves the overall robustness of hardware verification.