Automation of Serial Communication

Abstract

To design a modern-day application for any user an electronic system interacts with bunch of other Microcontrollers and sensors/displays/memories to give a user optimal experience and speed. Most of the modern era gadgets have tons of applications and it can process your bunch of data to take decisions for you and make your life easier. This simple feature which user experiences is an interaction between multiple sensor/Microcontrollers happening at the background. To establish all the features one major criterion is how good information is being transferred between each device to other device. Serial communication devices (USB, I2C, SPI, SPI, Hyper bus, UART) plays a crucial role in these kinds of transfers. Serial communication devices offer high speed data transfer with low pin count which is very essential in consumer electronics where cost is trivial factor of survival. This is infected one of the reason most of highspeed protocols are serial in nature which intern helps in reducing hardware size. In This project work as part of internship was majorly focused on characterizing these serial communication blocks where project journey started with the protocols like I2C or SPI which works with less than 1MSPS throughput to working towards serial communication devices like Hyperbus (JEDEC-251) with a throughput of 400MSPS. In the process of characterizing these devices and qualifying the data to reach the final customer datasheet time and accuracy are two major factors which must be balanced. This project is kind of opportunity to work on reducing time by automation, the complex systems which will act as Serial communication devices by using this automation. This project addresses automation of low frequency to the higher frequency protocol characterization and automation work. Characterization part contains all kind of functional validation to access the block functionality. Automation part makes work effort lesser. It makes validation strategy easier. The challenge in this project is how to automate each and every parameter. After manual validation. It is time taking process just because the automation should scalable, accurate and optimum in terms of all worst-case consideration. it is required to avoid infinite looping false results and all. Again, in the automation how to involve as less as possible devices that is also matters to reduce power, effort, and error possibilities. Automation should be compact and meaningful. And same weightage goes to data collection. It is the outcome of automation. It should self-explainable so that user can easily handle huge amount data.