(Mentor Graphics: Wilsonville, Oregon) -- Mentor Graphics has announced the donation of its Unified Coverage Database (UCDB) specification and application programming interface (API), which manage all coverage data from multiple tools, to Accellera’s Unified Coverage Database Interoperability (UCIS) technical subcommittee, the organization for electronic design industry standards. Coverage metrics are used to quantify verification effectiveness and to highlight verification shortcomings that require attention. Coverage metrics come from numerous sources, including simulation, static design checking, functional formal verification, sequential equivalence checking, and emulation. Each verification tool generally creates one or more collection of coverage metrics that may be discrete, overlapping, or subsets of one another. One of the key roles of the verification team is to bring this voluminous information together and interpret it so the verification team can determine verification completeness. “Managing verification information for verification closure is a major focus in the electronics industry,” says Shrenik Mehta, Accellera chairman.

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