A functional coverage approach for direct testing: An industrial IP as a case study

Tracking the test-plan progress of the direct testing methodology is a manual process. If the test-plan is complicated, the manual tracking effort is huge. In this paper, an automated functional coverage method is proposed to be used along with direct testing in order to automatically track the progress of the test-plan. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first time that functional coverage is proposed to be used with direct testing. Besides, this methodology may predict uncovered corner cases scenarios. The whole universal verification methodology (UVM) hasn't been used because it is a time-consuming process and an infrastructure for direct testing already exists. The time efforts to implement functional coverage only with direct testing are negligible compared to the time efforts needed to implement the whole UVM testbench. An industrial intellectual property (IP) model is used as a case study to demonstrate our findings.