Test suite measures protocol compliance
By Gabe Moretti -- EDN, June 10, 2004
As SOC (system-on-chip)-design complexity continues to grow, the verification effort expands rapidly and continues to account for at least half of the development cost of a new product. This problem becomes worse when chip designs incorporate complex serial protocols, such as PCI Express. Chip designers require specialized approaches to verifying compliance with complex protocol standards and interoperability with other cores on chip or with devices in the final system.
To address these problems, Denali Software has introduced PureSuite a verification suite that exercises PCI Express designs and measures both compliance with the specification and interoperability with other PXCI Express designs. PureSuite covers the entire PCI Express specification, including all items in the Compliance Checklist document from the PCI-SIG (PCI Special Interest Group). The tests cover all aspects of the specification—from physical layer, data link, transaction layer, and configuration space to initialization and power management. Tests use both compliant and noncompliant traffic to measure error-recovery capabilities.
Each test covers checklist items and details a description of purpose, assumptions, scenario, expected results, and corresponding PCI-SIG checklist-item number. Engineers can drive tests from PureSpec, a companion product to PureSuite, across the PCI link toward the design under test, or they can initiate them from the application interface of the design under test. PureSuite maintains a cumulative report of compliance results listing the pass-or-fail status for all tests. PureSuite’s list price is $50,000 per year per project. The product operates on all major platforms.
Denali Software Inc, 1-650-461-7200, www.denali.com.
