SafeTI: A Hardware Traffic Injector for Complex MPSoC Platform Validation and Characterization

Functional and timing validation of high performing safety-related platforms requires testing specific traffic patterns in the network-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 article 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 the safety open platform SELENE proving the effectiveness of the proposed traffic injector for characterizing the platform memory access capabilities under different patterns of contention on the multi-level cache system.