Traceability Traceability is the activity that maps all of the design and verification elements back to requirements to ensure that what is being built and tested is based on the requirements. Traceability is the correlation between circuit board requirements, FPGA requirements, conceptual design, HDL design, post-layout design, verification test cases, testbench and test results. A downstream traceability is a top to bottom reporting activity that shows the mapping or correlation between all of the project elements, and an upstream traceability is a bottom to top reporting activity. Traceability is often required for safety-critical applications such as avionics, industrial, automotive, medical and nuclear sectors. Spec-TRACER offers traceability between the following project elements: Circuit board requirements (or other higher level requirements) FPGA requirements HDL source code (specific process, functions or output assignments) Synthesis and Place & Route files and reports Test cases Testbench code Test results (log files, waveforms, code coverage reports, html reports) Spec-TRACER automatically generates individual or full traceability matrices. An example of full traceability matrix is shown below. The full traceability matrix is equipped with cross-navigation functionalities so that users are able to view/inspect/review the requirements, RTL source code, test cases, testbench code, files and reports included in the matrix.
