Coverage of compositional property sets under reactive constraints

Designs of Systems-on-Chip (SoC) modules can be comprehensively verified by property checking together with different coverage metrics. Some of these coverage criteria measure whether or not the property set fully describes the functional behavior of the design under verification. Making coverage statements with formal precision, however, is a difficult task, especially, in compositional verification approaches where the legal behavior of a module's environment is modeled through reactive environment constraints. In this paper, we address the validity of certain coverage criteria for property suites of individual SoC modules when composing these modules into a system. In particular, we provide a compositional reasoning framework determining that a system is “completely” verified if all modules are verified with Complete Interval Property Checking (C-IPC) under reactive constraints. Our method discovered issues that could not be detected by the verifications and coverage statements of the submodules alone.