Abstract
Since exhaustive functional verification is practically unachievable, coverage metrics are commonly used to avoid unnecessary verification repetitions and to measure the completeness of the verification test suit. However, in a modern hardware-accelerated environment, coverage may be measured across simulator and emulator. Hence, neither conventional coverage techniques performed in simulation nor hardware coverage monitors embedded in emulator can be applied. In this thesis, to measure coverage in a hardware-accelerated environment, we proposed to use coverage assertions which can detect coverage events cross simulator and emulator. In addition, since measuring coverage in a hardware-accelerated may cause hardware and performance overheads, an Assertion Operation Graph (AOG) and graph-based algorithms for the AOG are proposed to optimize the overheads of coverage assertions. We show that multiple coverage metrics can be successfully measured for several designs in the hardware-accelerated environment of Xilinx ISE. Our experimental results also show an encouraging reduction of overhead caused by coverage measurement.