Modified Condition Decision Coverage: A Hardware Verification Perspective

Abstract

Verification is a critical phase of the development cycle. It confirms the compliance of a design implementation with its functional specification. Coverage measures the progress of the verification plan. Structural coverage determines the code exercised by the functional tests. Modified Condition Decision Coverage (MC/DC) is a structural coverage type. This paper compiles a comprehensive overview of established MC/DC conventions, and develops novel MC/DC insights through conduction of experimental study for MC/DC in hardware verification. It provides a generic MC/DC overview while explaining MC/DC types, and criteria of MC/DC validation in the software domain. It introduces the motivation for adoption of MC/DC as a potential structural coverage type for hardware verification. The paper presents the experimental evaluation conducted over a diverse base of logic combinations. The introduced experimental results inferred distinct MC/DC insights. These insights present novel MC/DC aspects that optimize the minimal MC/DC coverage requirements, defines MC/DC compositionality concepts, and provide RTL design guidelines for MC/DC fulfillment.