Collectors and Monitors

Summary

This chapter introduced the concept of monitors, collectors, and checkers. Monitors are the verification modules that contain collectors, checkers, and reporting utilities. Checkers are used for protocol checking and are modeled as a checker instance that is contained in a monitor. The monitor extracts the data and emits the events that are required by the checkers to implement the necessary property checking statements. Monitors contain collectors used to collect coverage and data and transactions used in scoreboards and checkers.

Monitors must be implemented as passive modules that do not depend on the verification BFM or any active modules. This guideline allows for a monitor to be used without a BFM being present in the environment, therefore allowing for the easy migration of a monitor to the system level verification environment.