While I am waiting for an answer from the simulator vendor, I think I can form a non-tool-specific question about my problem.
I am running a simulation which dies when I collect functional coverage. I can turn on/off functional coverage collection and when it is on, at the very end of simulation, I get: "ncsim: *F,INTERR: INTERNAL EXCEPTION". It seems to be that while coverage is gathered, the problem occurs.
I can run tests which flow thru some channels of the dut and don't have the problem, but thru a specific channel of the dut, I often encounter the problem.
question1: What is classified as functional coverage? I'd like to leave functional coverage collection on and comment out all coverpoints/covergroups. (Actually I think I have, or am close, and the error still occurs.) So, I am wondering, what must I grep for to remove to be sure that functional coverage collection has no meaning? My thought is to divide and conquer.
Am I not just looking for "coverpoint" and "covergroup", but also "assert" (as some code might have assertion based functional coverage)? Is there anything else?
question2: (This is perhaps a bit tool specific.) If the -covdut, or scope of where coverage should be gathered is targetted to a sub-sub-module, would you expect that (possibly bad) coverage code at a higher level (or different area) would have zero affect on the coverage collection? (I've unsuccessfully tried to leave functional coverage collection on, but to move the target-scope to a trival part of the design, to see if the problem goes away.)