Active-HDL

Copyright Aldec, Inc.

Code Coverage Tutorial

Code Coverage Tutorial

Introduction
With the growing complexity of today's designs, testing the validity of HDL designs becomes increasingly difficult. Designers must answer the question of whether or not the design was fully tested, which basically means if all statements were executed. Designers usually must take a calculated risk and decide when their designs are fully tested and all "dangerous corners" are checked. Unfortunately, there is still a degree of uncertainty in this statement that leaves the risk that some areas in a design that are left unchecked can still cause problems. When time-tomarket becomes crucial to a project there is absolutely no room for doubt on this issue. Utilizing the new Code and Branch Coverage feature in Active-HDL Aldec helps engineers to remove the uncertainty of the design testing. Code Coverage is a debugging tool that allows users to check how satisfactory the source code has been developed. Code Coverage checks if all VHDL or Verilog statements from a testbench are executed during the simulation. Branch Coverage is a part of the Code Coverage engine. It examines branches of the IF or CASE statement and checks how many times a true or false condition was met by each branch during the simulation. Designers see clearly if their source code is fully covered by their testbenches, which allows to make sure if all VHDL or Verilog statements were executed.

Loading Sample Design

In this tutorial we will use the freq_meter sample design that is shipped with the Active-HDL software. The design you have just opened has to be compiled, before you advance to the simulation phase. 1. In the first step, run Active-HDL and open the Workspace/Design Explorer (File | Open Workspace/Design Explorer) to load the freq_meter workspace. Before Code Coverage can be used, the design should be compiled and the top-level unit should be selected. In our design, we will compile all files and select top-level unit as it is illustrated in Figure 1. To do so, choose the menu command Design | Compile All and then point to the testbench (stimulusfromfile) toplevel unit.

Figure 1. Setting testbench (stimulusfromfile) as top-level.

Code Coverage Setup

2. When this operation is completed you need to enable the generation of Code Coverage data. To do so, go to the Design menu and choose Settings. 3. In the Design Settings window, switch to the Code Coverage/Profiler tab:

Figure 2. The Design Settings window. 4. Select the Coverage radio button that enables the generation of Code Coverage data. In the Output directory field, you will see the path to the folder where the results.ccl will be created. If required, you can specify another location by pressing the browsing button (...). During the simulation, the simulator will write the Code Coverage data to this folder. 5. After you have specified Code Coverage settings, you can close the Design Settings window and run the simulation (Simulation | Initialize Simulation, then Run (Alt+F5)). Code Coverage data is gathered during the simulation, however, the file specified in the Output directory field is created when you choose End Simulation from the Simulation menu. When the Collect data per instance checkbox is selected, the coverage data will be collected separately for each instantiated object. The Code Coverage Viewer displays this information in a separate tab - Instances. By default, this option is not set and Code Coverage collects the data on a per-unit basis. The Collect data for all units checkbox determines whether the coverage data should be limited to objects residing in the current working library or extended to objects from external system libraries as well.

Checking Results
When simulation is complete, you can then invoke the Code Coverage Viewer from the Tools menu and view the results generated by Code Coverage. 6. Selecting Code Coverage brings up the Code Coverage Viewer window. In this window, choose Open (Ctrl+O) from the File menu or click the Open File icon. This window allows you to find and point to the file containing the Code Coverage data that will be displayed in the Code Coverage Viewer window.

Figure 3. Loading the Code Coverage data. Double-click the results.ccl file or select it and press Open. The Code Coverage data is loaded into the Code Coverage Viewer window as it is presented in Figure 4.

Figure 4. The Code Coverage Viewer window. The Source Code window displays the following columns: Line Displays the line numbers of the source code. Count Displays an execution count for each line of the HDL code. If a number of lines has been collapsed with - sign, the Count Column displays the total for all collapsed lines. If a line contains more than one executable statement, the count number is followed by an asterisk. Moving the mouse pointer over that line displays a tooltip with execution counts for each statement BC Displays Branch Coverage data for the IF or CASE construct. When the source code contains the IF construct then the BC column displays the number of conditions that evaluated to True (e.g. 3t) and the number of conditions that evaluated to False (e.g. 4f) during the simulation. True (t) means that the condition in the selected if

branch was met and this branch was executed. False (f) means that the condition in the if branch was not met and the elsif or else branches were executed instead. The total number of executions is displayed in the Count column. When the source code contains the CASE construct then the BC column displays the number of when branches that covered all explicitly listed choices and the total number of branches within the construct. By selecting the Details tab in the right pane, you can see details in the form of graphical charts describing the Code Coverage results of your project.

Figure 5. The Details tab of the Code Coverage Viewer window. The upper part presents the results generated by the Code Coverage engine. The Results for selected item chart shows the number of executed statements for the selected instance in green and the number of statements that were not executed within this instance in red. The lower part presents the results generated by the Branch Coverage engine. The Branch Coverage for selected item chart shows the number of executed branches for the selected instance in green and the number of branches that were not executed in red.

Conclusion
Code/Branch Coverage is a very powerful debugging tool that provides designers an efficient analysis of the currently used testbench. This tool can decrease the time required for verification and optimize the development process by showing users if they still need to develop their tests and which part of the design needs to be tested. Thank you for using Active-HDL!