A Study on Verification of APB Protocol

With ever-advancing microprocessor technology and System-on-Chip (SoC) architectures, it is required to effectively interface and connect the high-speed devices on the board/chip along with the relatively low-speed and low-frequency components. This is where on-chip interconnects come into the picture with the ARM-based AMBA bus systems. While the AMBA protocol is further divided into multiple types of sub-protocols optimized for high or low speed peripherals, this work will solely focus on the Advanced Peripheral Bus (APB) Protocol. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive survey of some of the notable research and works that have been done to design and verify this protocol, utilizing a spectrum of different tools and methodologies. This survey looks at previous works where different DUTs are used as slave for the APB interface (DAC/ADC and Inter-Integrated Circuits), and where assertion, code-based and functional coverage have been obtained, with a maximum of 100 and 97 percent functional and code coverage respectively.