OCP-IP Releases Functional Coverage Guidelines; Guidelines eliminate the need for ''best guess'' verification by engineers

PORTLAND, ORE — June 13, 2006 —Open Core Protocol International Partnership (OCP-IP) today announced the availability of Functional Coverage guidelines. Functional Coverage is a technique to measure the quality of the stimuli generated by a verification test suite.  It provides an objective view of the verification space and is used to measure the completeness of the verification of an OCP IP block.  The guidelines eliminate the need for “best guess” verification by engineers making certain an OCP interface complies with the current OCP 2.1 specification, assuring verification quality and IP block compatibility at system level.

In a pseudo-random based verification environment in which the stimuli are randomly generated within a set of constraints, a solid Functional Coverage indicates which parts of the state space were covered, and which parts were not. For the uncovered corners, the generation constraints must be tightened, or specific directed tests must be written.

Work on the Functional Coverage was completed by the OCP-IP Functional Verification working group including representatives from: Jeda Technologies, MIPS, Sonics Inc, Synopsys, Texas Instruments, TransEDA, and Yogitech.  This work compliments a set of formal compliance checks already released by the FVWG in October 2005.

"The new coverage guidelines make it easier for engineers to have even greater verification coverage as a part of the OCP socket," said Jeroen Vliegen, System Engineer for Texas Instruments and member of the OCP-IP Functional Verification Working Group.  "It was a pleasure leading the collaboration between such productive members of OCP-IP's FVWG."

"The configurability of the OCP protocol fits naturally with today's Functional Coverage driven verification methodology," said Steve McMaster, Senior Staff Engineer for Synopsys and Chairman of the OCP-IP FVWG. "It was a pleasure to participate in this important work with such a dynamic group."

“Presenting defined functional coverage guidelines to the industry further strengthens the value and utility of the OCP standard”, said Silvano Motto, CEO of Yogitech.  “This significant accomplishment was made possible by the expert contributions of the OCP-IP FVWG team, in which I am very proud Yogitech participated as a verification IP provider.”

“ The guidelines produced by our Functional Verification Working Group are yet another extremely valuable addition to OCP-IP’s robust, thriving infrastructure, said Ian Mackintosh, president OCP-IP.” “We are proud of the leading-edge work completed by our Functional Verification Working Group.”

Members may download and review a copy of the compliance checks by visiting the member’s only section at www.ocpip.org

About OCP-IP

The OCP International Partnership Association, Inc. (OCP-IP), formed in 2001, promotes and supports the Open Core Protocol (OCP) as the complete socket standard ensuring rapid creation and integration of interoperable virtual components.  OCP-IP's Governing Steering Committee participants include: Nokia [NYSE: NOK], Texas Instruments [NYSE: TXN], Toshiba Semiconductor Group (including Toshiba America TAEC), and Sonics.  OCP-IP is a non-profit corporation delivering the first fully supported, openly licensed, core-centric protocol comprehensively fulfilling system-level integration requirements.  The OCP facilitates IP core reusability and reduces design time, risk, and manufacturing costs for SoC designs. VSIA endorses the OCP socket, and OCP-IP is affiliated with VSIA. For additional background and membership information, visit www.OCPIP.org.