Automotive micro-controller interface protocol silicon validation using PWM based protocol emulator

The role of microcontrollers is increasing day by day in the automotive industry. AURIX (Automotive Real time Integrated NeXt Generation Architecture) is a 32-bit Infineon microcontroller family, targeting the automotive industry in terms of performance and safety. With nearly hundred interfaces, overall cost of silicon validation setup is very huge in terms of number of sensor/slave devices to be connected to micro-controller on validation board and also there are huge challenges in terms of creating stimulus from sensor/slave devices towards micro-controller in lab environment. Creating variety of stimulus is very important to qualify the microcontroller interface protocols for flawless functionality. Another important challenge in using real world sensors/slave devices is, their ability to inject errors on the interface protocol is very limited, if not completely absent. Typically, the protocol errors include bit flip, CRC/parity error, framing error, encoding errors and so on. To overcome the mentioned challenges in automotive microcontroller silicon validation, the proposed solution uses FPGA based protocol/sensor emulation. Usage of generic modules in emulating the protocols drastically reduces cost of FPGA development by increasing reuse of various RTL modules across different protocols. The objective of this approach is to save validation time and also to achieve excellent protocol interface coverage, in terms of protocol functionality testing and error handling, thereby significantly improving the overall validation confidence of automotive micro-controller interface protocols.