SafeTI: a Hardware Traffic Injector for MPSoC Functional and Timing Validation

Abstract

Functional and timing validation of safety-related MPSoCs requires testing specific traffic patterns in the on-chip interconnects. Generally, testing needs to be performed by using software tests whose degree of control on the traffic generated is indirect, and limited to behavior that can be triggered by software, thus often unable to produce traffic generated by peripherals. Therefore, untested traffic scenarios can be abundant and, to a large extent, it is hard to know what traffic scenarios have been effectively tested. This paper presents the safe traffic injector, SafeTI, which allows injecting programmable traffic in AMBA AHB interconnects with high flexibility and degree of control, thus easing achieving high coverage in terms of traffic scenarios tested, and mitigating the uncertainty due to the difficulties to relate software tests with actual traffic scenarios tested. We also integrate successfully the SafeTI in an industrial MPSoC for the space domain proving the effectiveness of the proposed traffic injector.