11/28/2010

Protocol Monitors for WCI and WSI

We are in a phase of verification build-out. The RTL pillar of OpenCPI will soon have protocol monitors for two of the most-popular interface patterns; WCI and WSI. Protocol monitors are RTL modules that passively observe a specific master-slave link and make observations about events and errors. They may be used in functional simulation; and being synthesizable, they may be used to observe bitstreams as an adjunct to methods like ChipScope® and SignalTap®. A value of protocol monitors is that they work as a Bus Functional Model (BFM) in reverse: they abstract low-level protocol actions to higher-level signal-phase and transaction-level (TL) events.