( 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