Chapter 18. Navigating the Line Coverage Window
| Part IV. Graphical User Interface |

## Chapter 18. Navigating the Line Coverage Window

Line coverage is the quickest way to determine what logic in your design is being exercised and which logic has not be exercised during simulation. If a line was found to not be simulated, this is an indication that there was some event that did not occur or did not occur at the proper time to cause a previous conditional expression to be evaluated to true or false. For example, if a block of code looked something like:

Example 18.1. Line Coverage Example

      always @(posedge clock)  // Line 1
        if( a )                // Line 2
          b <= 1'b0;           // Line 3
        else                   // Line 4
          b <= 1'b1;           // Line 5

If line 3 was shown to be not covered, this would indicate that at the positive edge of the term "clock", the value of "a" never evaluated to a value of 1 (true). To make line 3 become covered, we would need to setup a situation in the diagnostic that caused "a" to become true at the positive edge of the term "clock".

On the other hand, if all lines 2 - 5 were found to be uncovered, this would indicate the the term "clock" never made a transition from some value to a 1 (true) value during simulation.

## 18.1. Viewing Uncovered Lines

To view line coverage for all uncovered lines for a specific module/instance, do the following:

1. Make sure that the Show Uncovered menu item in the report menu is selected.

2. Select the line coverage metric in the coverage bar by left-clicking on selection button to the left of "Line".

3. Select one of the modules/instances that is highlighted in the uncovered color scheme (to change this color scheme, see Chapter 28, Navigating the Preferences Window) in the listbox. This will cause the selected module/instance source code to be displayed in the file viewer.

Once the selected module/instance has been displayed, scroll down in the Coverage File Viewer window (using the scroll bars to the right and below the Coverage File Viewer window) until you have reached a line that is highlighted in the uncovered color scheme. The line number of the highlighted line will be printed to the left of the source code line. This line represents a line that was found to not be hit during the simulation of this module/instance.

## 18.2. Excluding/Included Uncovered Lines from Line Coverage

Any uncovered line in the design may be included/excluded from coverage consideration. To the left of each uncovered line is an underlined "I" (line is currently included in coverage) or "E" (line is currently excluded in coverage). Clicking on an "I" will cause a exclusion reason popup window to be displayed, allowing you to specify a reason for excluding this line. Once a reason has been entered, the coverage exclusion property of the line will change to an "E" and be highlighted in the "covered" color scheme and the summary line coverage information will be recalculated and redisplayed in the listbox to reflect the current status of line coverage for the current module/instance. Clicking on an "E" will cause the current line to be displayed in the "uncovered" color scheme, the "E" will change to an "I", and the summary line coverage will be recalculated and redisplayed in the summary listbox. Figure 18.1, “Example of uncovered line included for line coverage consideration” shows an uncovered line that is included for coverage consideration. Figure 18.2, “Example of uncovered line excluded for line coverage consideration” shows the same line which is now excluded from coverage consideration.

Figure 18.1. Example of uncovered line included for line coverage consideration

Figure 18.2. Example of uncovered line excluded for line coverage consideration

In addition to changing the line coverage information, the combinational logic coverage information for an uncovered statement on that line will also be implicitly excluded from coverage (though the exclude properties for each subexpression of the statement will not change).

If the user excludes any line in the design, the Save CDD... option in the file menu will be enabled. This allows the user to save the excluded property either back to the CDD file (or to a newly named CDD file). Doing so will allow the user to load the CDD file at a different time and retain the knowledge of which lines have been excluded/included for coverage. Additionally, if a saved CDD file with coverage exclusion is merged with another CDD file, the excluded line information is preserved for the resulting merged CDD file.

If a line has been excluded from coverage and an exclusion reason was specified, you can view the reason for exclusion by right-click-and-hold on the "E" on the desired line. This will cause a tooltip-style window to be displayed specifying the reason for exclusion. The background color of the tooltip will be the same color as the "covered" background color to help distinguish it from a normal tooltip. To cause the exclusion reason tooltip to disappear, simply release the button.

## 18.3. Viewing Covered Lines

To view line coverage for all covered lines for a specific module/instance, do the following:

1. Make sure that the Show Covered menu item in the report menu is selected.

2. Select the line coverage metric in the coverage bar by left-clicking on the selection button to the left of "Line".

3. Select one of the modules/instances in the listbox that shows that at least one line was considered coverable by Covered.

Once the selected module/instance has been displayed, scroll down in the Coverage File Viewer window (using the scroll bars to the right and below the Coverage File Viewer window) until you have reached a line that is highlighted in the covered color scheme. The line number of the highlighted line will be printed to the left of the source code line. This line represents a line that was found to be hit during the simulation of this module/instance.

| Note
You may see both the covered and uncovered line coverage simultaneously by selecting both the Show Uncovered and Show Covered items in the Report menu. This is sometimes useful to see what logic Covered was not able to provide coverage support for (all lines which contain code that are not highlighted in either the uncovered or covered color schemes).

Chapter 17. Navigating the Main Window |  | Chapter 19. Navigating the Toggle Coverage Window