Validation Beyond Protocol Exerciser

A prominent semiconductor manufacturer that specializes in the design and production of microcontrollers, microprocessors, and integrated circuits and known for their reliable and high-performance solutions that power numerous embedded systems and devices, were in a look out for a tool to validate I2C and SPI protocol compliance on their silicon chips.

They started with a protocol exerciser available in the market to conduct validation because they felt it would be easy to use, economical and simple to set up hardware. To validate they had to do a series of steps including writing test procedures, building Software on top of the protocol exerciser, executing the tests and creating reports. 

Challenges

- Only 43% of timing parameter tests were covered with the exerciser and custom software setup.

- All parametric sweeps required development of custom software modules. This resulted in spending a substantial amount of effort and time to bring up the validation setup to a certain level.

- The hardware setup was not protocol generic and had to be changed for each protocol validation. Between each protocol, a manual intervention was needed to change the connections. This hindered the complete automation of the test setup.

- Only limited DUT specific tests could be conducted. This was not allowing them to perform DUT specific functional tests.

- Support received from the Protocol Exerciser vendor was inadequate.

Discover how Soliton's Protocol Validation Solutions helped them overcome their challenges