Connectivity Firmware Development and Test Automation

Abstract

Bluetooth is a wireless protocol and standard for personal area networks. It has hardware and software stack as layered and modular architecture. Now in the hardware, it is further configured at the boot time using software i.e. firmware. As per today's scenario of low power design, new standard of Bluetooth is BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy). In this thesis, development firmware for classic Bluetooth and LE (Low Energy) controllers is carried out. This firmware development can be divided into two categories. One is a development of automation tools and other is embedded applications development with providing resolution of bugs. This thesis explores the understanding of Bluetooth technology, hardware and the firmware components in the Bluetooth controller.

The automation tools are written in Perl script that removes the need of manually generating configuration file and manual running of sanity test cases using Broadcom proprietary tool for verifying BLE firmware functionality. One of the automation tools generate configuration file according to input parameters of Bluetooth chipsets provided by user. The other developed automation tool runs the sanity test cases automatically that configured to run all in a single shot or run a specified test case.

The firmware designed for embedded applications like UHE (USB Human Interface devices Emulation) and AT commands based application need testing. The issues reported were like memory corruption, firmware hanging and crashes etc. UART debug traces of application and framework have been observed for debugging and finding causes of the issues. The hardware tools like JTAG based debugger and USB based logic analyzer have been used for the same. Embedded applications are verified for firmware functionality. Further, it is also experimented to stabilize the firmware with performance tuning in terms of minimal data loss.