Coverage Analysis Of North Birdge Functional Verification

The growing complexity of ASIC design dictates the use of cost-effective functional verification method, coverage analysis become more and more important.This dissertation starts with techniques of functional verification,and introduce the existing and mature techniques in this field, including formal verification and simulation verification. Then the design of North Bridge is verified by the means of simulation verification. The procedure of simulation verification has three steps: test generation, result checking and coverage analysis. This work has following characteristics: generating test cases random with constraints; using assertion based technique in result checking; adopting a compound method of the program-based coverage and functional-based coverage analysis during verification.In the process of verification, program-based coverage analysis is to check the verification efficiency of program; function-based coverage analysis is to check the verification of function. Both of the two coverage metrics has their own blind spot. In order to solve this problem, we try to combine the above two coverage analysis method in the verification of PCI Bridge. The same test cases are loaded in one verification platform; meanwhile the two kinds of coverage are analyzed. Through this method, we improve the dependability and efficiency of the verification.In this dissertation, we presented a coverage driven verification, which is used in our North Bridge verification. Our results show that the coverage analysis improves verification efficiency. The coverage model has a standard interface and can be reused in other similar system.