IP Model Quality Measurement
Tesh Tesfaye
JEDA Technologies Inc., USA

In virtual platform applications, it's estimated that more than 70% of engineering time and effort is spent on troubleshooting and debugging various Virtual Platform issues, namely IP models, integration issues, configuration issues, communication adapter issues etc. Today, platform users are facing unknown quality of the IP and platform models and often times a stable platform comes too late for embeded software development or system performance validation.

It's our view that the problem is contributed by the lack of quantifiable quality measurement for IP models as they get used in fast platform development. An IP model quality standard should enforce some quantifiable quality metric that's easily communicable between the model creator and model user to avoid any ambiguity in the design assumptions and usage of the model.

We present a case study that illustrates quality measurement through coverage collection and analysis using a TLM2 example. In this example, We employed two coverage collection metrics, code coverage and transaction coverage. The presentation will also show how each of these methodologies plays a complimentary role in helping us identify quality issues in the IP model we used.