HARDWARE TOOLS Application in SLIMbus Traffic Generator

It was reported from LONDON that LnK (Romse, Belgium) has a serial low-power inter-chip media bus (SLIMbus) interactive traffic generator which can work with its SLIMbus protocol analyzer to provide engineers with test and debug capabilities. SLIMbus is a standard interface between baseband or application processors and peripheral components in mobile terminals. It supports many digital audio components simultaneously, and also efficiently carries multiple digital audio data streams at differing sample rates and bit widths. SLIMbus is implemented as a synchronous 2-wire, configurable time division multi-plexed (TDM) frame structure with supporting bus arbitration mechanisms and message structures which permit re-configuring the bus operational characteristics to system application needs at runtime. The interactive traffic generator handles automatic response to incoming messages, automatic updates of the guide byte and arbitrates on message channel when necessary. In 2007 the company's first traffic generator was oriented towards the IP simulation benches. It was at the time companies started to design their first SLIMbus IP and the urgent need was really to have a SLIMbus compliant bit pattern files. LnK says at that time there was not any requests yet to get some level of interactivity. As first silicon is appearing on the market and most company IPs are running on FPGA platforms, there are new requirement that the interactive traffic generator is defined to fulfil. When designing the interactive traffic generator, LnL says it paid a lot of attention to keep all the powerful features of the existing static traffic generator (error insertions, total control on the bit stream, etc.) while adding all the new interactive features. SLIMbus was developed within the MIPI Alliance and as an active MIPI contributor member, LnK has been dedicated to providing test and verification solutions for SLIMbus since 2007 and its founders have been a driving force behind the SLIMbus specification since the beginning.