Addressing Stress and Glitch Injection Testing Requirements with Soliton's Protocol Validation Suite

This case study explores how Soliton’s Protocol Validation Suite (PVS) helped a customer address their need for stress test and glitch injection with reduced overall testing time, minimized manual effort, and comprehensive coverage.   


Accurate and efficient protocol validation is fundamental to ensure the reliability, interoperability, and performance of semiconductor devices. Traditional validation processes fall short when adapting to evolving test requirements or accelerating existing workflows. The challenges become even more pronounced when dealing with advanced tests outside the standard validation suite, such as stress tests or glitch injections. 

Customer’s Requirement with Stress Testing and Glitch Injection  

Our customer from a large semiconductor company utilized a validation system called the Data Timing Generator (DTG) for their I2C and I3C protocol testing. This system helped them achieve the functional and basic timing tests. However, the customer relied on writing manual test scripts in Python, which required looking up documentation for functions compatible with their tool. This took extensive manual effort. 

In addition to the basic tests, the customer had two particular test cases to validate their device. One test case was to verify how well the device performed while handling high-volume transactions (known as the stress test), and the other was to examine how tolerant the device was to glitches in the I2C and I3C signals (glitch injection). While looking for a way to perform these tests efficiently, they also sought to enhance their overall validation process for test coverage and test time reduction with accurate results.  

Before discussing the solution, let’s briefly examine what the customer wanted to accomplish with the special tests.   

 

  • Handling High-Volume Transactions for Performance Validation

Stress testing involves rapidly executing numerous read or write operations (or both) to a register or a bank of registers to ensure robust device performance. As part of the stress test, our customer needed to perform more than 1,00,000 transactions on their DUT and ensure it responded accurately to all the transactions.  

While their existing setup could handle the task, the process was highly time-consuming, taking over an hour to complete. The customer wanted a mechanism to perform this test quickly and infer the test results through a report or GUI that could analyze the response for each iteration.   

 

  • Glitch Injection Test 

In addition to the stress test, the customer wanted to test their DUT’s performance against glitches in the SCL/SDA signals. They wanted to induce glitches at various places of SCL and SDA lines, with varying widths of the glitch, and verify the device’s tolerance to these glitches.   
Glitch Injection Waveform

 

The Solution to Customer’s Requirements 

By adopting Soliton’s PVS, the customer was able to improve their current validation process and meet these requirements with remarkable efficiency. Here’s how PVS helped to cover these test cases in the validation process:   

 

  • Addressing Stress Testing with the Test Plan Editor  

Soliton’s Protocol Validation Tool has a feature called the Test Plan Editor, which has functions and structures that allow users to easily create test scripts using an intuitive drag-and-drop interface. One of the functions of the Test Plan Editor is the Stress Test. This function allows the user to configure the type of command to be sent to the device (like Read, Write, or both), the number of times it must be executed, and conditions to verify the DUT’s response.   

 

Using this function, the customer was able to create a simple test script by configuring the register address, operation command type, and iterations based on their requirements. As a result, they could perform the corresponding 1,00,000 transactions in the DUT’s register as part of the stress test. This task, which would have required weeks of development effort, was completed in minutes.   

 

  • Performing Glitch Injection with the Custom Command Format (CCF)   

Similar to the Stress Test, the Test Plan Editor has a function called Custom Command Format (CCF), which enables users to alter or change the format of the protocol command and customize it based on their requirements. This feature gives complete control over waveform customization, allowing users to inject faults/glitches, specify their width and position, and manipulate clock cycles, all within a user-friendly interface.   

Glitch Test

 

With this feature, our customer could inject a glitch into their existing waveform and verify whether the device was reliable against the glitch. This comprehensive functionality met the customer’s test requirements and ensured a high accuracy of 1ns with the glitch width.   

In addition to the above-mentioned features, PVS provides a comprehensive library of pre-built test scripts. This allows users to select and customize scripts to execute a wide range of custom tests. Moreover, our expert support further aids in the creation of tailored test cases based on the customer’s specific requirements.   

Ensure Comprehensive Protocol Validation with PVS  

With its out-of-the-box features, PVS provided the customer with a robust, easy-to-implement, and scalable solution. Our comprehensive support, along with the tool’s features, transformed their validation processes by reducing their testing time from 3 weeks to 2 days.   

Looking for a comprehensive solution to address your unique protocol validation needs? Connect with us for a quick demo and learn more about our tool today!