A domain coverage metric for the validation of behavioral VHDL descriptions

During functional validation, corner cases and boundary conditions are known to be difficult to verify. We propose a functional fault coverage metric for behavioral VHDL descriptions which evaluates the coverage of faults which cause the behavior to execute an incorrect functional domain. Although domain faults are known to be a source of design errors, they are not targeted explicitly by previous work in functional validation. We propose an efficient method to compute domain coverage in VHDL descriptions and we generate domain coverage results for several benchmark VHDL circuits for comparison to other approaches.