An efficient control-oriented coverage metric

Abstract

Coverage metrics, which evaluate the ability of a test sequence to detect design faults, are essential to the validation process. A key source of difficulty in determining fault detection is that the control flow path traversed in the presence of a fault cannot be determined. Fault detection can only be accurately determined by exploring the set of all control flow paths, which may be traversed as a result of a fault. We present a coverage metric that determines the propagation of fault effects along all possible faulty control flow paths. The complexity of exploring multiple control flow paths is greatly alleviated by heuristically pruning infeasible control flow paths using the algorithm that we present. The proposed coverage metric provides high accuracy in designs that contain complex control flow. The results obtained are promising.