( DAC 99 Item 24 ) ----------------------------------------------- [6/25/99]
GETTING PERFECT COVERAGE: There must be at least 6 major companies and
God-knows how many side companies offering some sort of code coverage.
"Surefire's SureCov, Summit's HDL Score, and TransEDA's Verisure:
I attended these three demo suites and I feel like I'm splitting
hairs to differentiate the tools. Each of the demos pretty much
said the same things.
Surefire ( http://www.surefirev.com ) is a small startup that really
seems to want our business. They claim SureCov requires less time
overhead than their competition. They've said that each RTL file
could be instrumented separately to fit our simulation environment
and that they could recognize our state machine coding style (or they
would write the code to do it if we gave them a sample).
TransEDA. ( http://www.transeda.com ) Verisure. I did not get as
good a first impression from these people. They create one
instrumented file for the entire design which would not work in our
environment. I asked about alternatives and didn't really get a
response. They do have the cool ability to put '//Verisure Off' and
'//Verisure On' around parts of code you don't want to be covered.
For example, a default in a case statement. The tool then warns you
if you did cover the area you had turned off.
Summit (http://www.summit-design.com ) is the market leader in code
coverage. They have the advantage of being the first in the market
and acquiring the big name/big money accounts. Their tool had no
problem with the state machine example Paul sent them. They claim to
be able to handle separately instrumented RTL files. Also, they have
a bit vector coverage mode. This means that they can check that each
bit in the expression bus has triggered code. For example, if (|bus)
... would check that each bit of "bus" had triggered the "if" to
occur. They say that no one in the industry has this capability yet,
but Surefire is working on it.
Synopsys, Cadence and Veritools ( http://www.veritools-web.com ) also
have code coverage tools. Cadence is weak but free (under our current
licensing agreement)."
- an anon engineer
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