SystemVerilog Assertions and Functional Coverage

Posted by Ken Cheung in Events, Training on Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Aldec is offering a seminar titled, "SystemVerilog Assertions and Functional Coverage." The event will take place on Thursday, August 21st. Two sessions are available: (1) Morning: 8am to noon and (2) Afternoon: 1:00 pm to 5:00 pm. The cost is $199. Continental breakfast or refreshments are included. The seminar will be presented by Ashok Mehta of DefineView Consulting. Mehta has worked in the semiconductor industry for the past 24+ years in hardware design and verification engineering / management positions.

Agenda

SVA Methodology

  • What's an assertion?
  • What are the advantages of SVA?
  • Assertion Based Verification (ABV) Methodology Guidelines

SVA Language Overview

  • Immediate assertions
  • Concurrent assertions
  • Basics (implication operator, formal args, severity levels, disable iff, etc.)
  • Binding design module to property module
  • Sampled value functions ($rose, $fell, $stable, $past)
  • Operators (clock delay, consecutive, repetition, non-consecutive, goto)
  • Sequence 'within', 'throughout', 'and', 'intersect', 'or', 'not', 'firstmatch'
  • If… else
  • System Functions ($onehot, $isunknown, etc.)/System Tasks ($asserton, $assertoff, etc.)
  • .ended, .matched methods to detect endpoint of a sequence
  • Multi-Clocked properties
  • Local Variables
  • Recursive properties
  • embedding concurrent assertions in procedural code; calling subroutines; etc

Functional Coverage Overview

  • Code Coverage vs. Functional Coverage
  • Brief overview of covergroup, coverpoint, cross, transition with simple applications

System Verilog Assertions (SVA) is a powerful subset of the IEEE 1800 System Verilog standard. Its hardware oriented concurrent semantics allow for intuitive development of complex multi-clock domain checkers to catch those elusive bugs at the source. It allows for clean separation from the design logic and allows for parameterization of properties resulting in a modular reusable methodology.

Functional Coverage (FC) is another subset of System Verilog that allows you to measure how much of design intent have you covered with your tests/regressions. Combined SVA and FC allow for a modular, reusable and objective methodology that shortens time to develop and debug and gain much higher confidence in delivering a first pass working silicon.

More info: SystemVerilog Assertions and Functional Coverage Morning | Afternoon

If you found this page useful, bookmark and share it on:

Possibly of Interest

 
EDA Blog Newsletter
Don't have time to visit EDA Blog everyday? Then sign up for our free newsletter. We'll send you an email when we have something to share with you. Your email address will be kept confidential and we will not share, sell, or rent it to anyone. You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking a link in the email.

Enter your email address to sign up for our free newsletter:   

If you are familiar with RSS feeds, you can also sign up for our free blog feed. Our RSS feed is updated in real-time while our newsletter is updated daily.