The Notion of Cross Coverage in AMS Design Verification

Abstract

Coverage monitoring is fundamental to design verification. Coverage artifacts are well developed for digital integrated circuits and these aim to cover the discrete state space and logical behaviors of the design. Analog designers are similarly concerned with the operating regions of the design and its response to an infinite and dense input space. Analog variables can influence each other in far more complex ways as compared to digital variables, consequently, the notion of cross coverage, as introduced in the analog context for the first time in this paper, is of high importance in analog design verification. This paper presents the formal syntax and semantics of analog cross coverage artifacts, the methods for evaluating them using our tool kit, and most importantly, the insights that can be gained from such cross coverage analysis.