A Dynamic and Interactive Diagnosing and Testing Method for Development of Digital TV Receiver System

Test is important to development of a large complex embedded system, like digital TV system. A good test method gets twice the result with half the effort. The paper introduces a useful, dynamical and interactive diagnosing and test approach to the system. With this approach, some important OS's level object such as thread, queue, memory and semaphore related information could be collected as required and in real-time. Analyzing those could judge whether there are deadlocks, memory leaks, task starvation etc. Meanwhile a configurable stub module for collecting status and attribute of main software module is presented. Also a monitoring method of digital TV system was described. With those diagnose method and tools, bugs and issues could be located easily and some elusive problem could be solved efficiently. All the diagnosing tools and description were based on Nucleus OS and Conexant Corp.'s Digital TV chip cx2417x-one chip solution for DTV.