Denali offers PCI Express compliance suite

Introduced a year and a half ago, PureSpec contains a bus-functional model and an assertion library, and has around 40 customers, said David Lin, Denali vice president of product management. But the assertions, he noted, depend on stimulus, and don't provide a complete check of the PCI Express specification. That's where PureSuite comes in.

PureSuite exercises PCI Express functionality and corner cases, including all items defined in the compliance checklist document from the PCI Special Interest Group (PCI SIG). It checks the physical layer, data link, transaction layer, and configuration space with both compliant and non-compliant traffic to measure error recovery capabilities.

"It tries to exercise a design in a targeted fashion against the checklist," Lin said. "I think PureSuite can save three to five man-years because all the tests are pre-built, configured, and tailored dynamically to the DUT [device under test] configuration."

Users can edit or customize tests, Lin noted, by adjusting the Specification of Modeling Architectures (SOMA) file that comes with PureSpec. For example, a user could run only the data link layer tests, or check specific compliance checklist items.

Each test includes a description of purpose, assumptions, scenario, expected result, and PCI-SIG checklist item number. The tests are written in C, and can be accessed through the Verilog programming language interface (PLI). The C language capability lets Denali support all existing verification environments, Lin said.

PureSuite works only with PureSpec and is available now at $50,000 per project. A more detailed view of PureSpec and PureSuite is provided in a All material on this site Copyright © 2005 CMP Media LLC. All rights reserved.
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