Patent ID: 7292970

Claim:
A method of employing code coverage having a flow as follows: instrumenting a design source file with coverage probes; generating a hierarchical name for each coverage probe; synthesizing the instrumented design source file into a gate-level netlist; the list of hierarchical names is used to generate two scripts, a reset trigger script to initiate coverage testing, and a probe extraction script to identify to the user which gates are uncovered; using said reset trigger script, running an event-based simulation of the design source file using functional gate models to produce a list of unexercised probes; also running the gate-level netlist in a hardware emulator with the probe extraction script to extract probe register values; and extracting and saving the extracted probe register values (and names) into a history file having a valid input format for use by a code coverage tool, wherein both the list of unexercised probes from the simulation and the extracted probe register values from the hardware emulation are analyzed for code coverage in the code coverage tool.