Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Reverse Coverage Analysis

2012; Springer Science+Business Media; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1007/978-3-642-34188-5_17

1611-3349

Ariel J. Birnbaum, Laurent Sébastien Fournier, Steve Mittermaier, Avi Ziv,

Formal Methods in Verification

Commonly used approaches for accumulating coverage data do not properly track events that have been covered in the past but not recently (stale events). They either treat stale events as covered events (global approach) or as uncovered events (window approach). We propose a new approach called reverse coverage analysis that is based on tracking the last time each coverage event was hit and looking at the coverage data backward in time from the present. With this approach, we can easily identify stale events and when the ability to cover them was lost. The reverse coverage approach was successfully used in the verification of two high-end IBM microprocessors and improved treatment of stale events and their causes.