Seed Selector: A Tree Evaluation Mechanism to Speed Up Functional Coverage Collection in Hardware Verification Environments

Functional verification is the process of demonstrating that a system meets its functional requirements before it is manufactured. Functional coverage is a measure of which functionalities have been exercised by the tests. Executing tests with scenarios that have already been tested results in a loss of time and resources that are usually very limited when developing a project. Efficiently reaching high functional coverage levels in simulation-based verification will depend directly on the scenarios that are tested in every iteration, specifically on the stimulus that each of the tests apply to the design. We have created a tree based mechanism that seeks to discard test iterations whose seeds do not contribute sufficiently to current coverage levels. The main goal is to speed up coverage collection, avoiding wasting time by running said seeds. We found that such a mechanism managed to speed up the functional coverage collection by 42% compared to the original state.