A UVM-based Verification Approach for MIPI DSI Low-Level Protocol layer

Abstract

Display Serial Interface (DSI) is a high-speed serial interface standard. It supports display and touch screens in mobile devices such as smartphones, laptops, tablets, and other platforms. DSI describes several layers that define the detailed interconnect between a host processor and a peripheral device in a mobile system. The targeted DSI protocol layer is the low-level layer in the standard which is responsible for bytes organization, error-checking information addition, and packet formulation. In this paper, we propose a constrained random Coverage-Driven Verification approach (CDV) for the DSI low-level protocol layer using Universal Verification Methodology (UVM). This approach could be the basis of a standardized Verification Intellectual Property (VIP) to test and verify the standardized DSI layer. We provide a well-established base of a reusable and scalable UVM environment that can verify the DSI protocol layer using various techniques such as error injection mechanism, System Verilog Assertions (SVA), and direct UVM sequences aim to cover the different real-life scenarios between the host processor and the peripheral device. Our results show that we can detect all inserted errors to assure the functionality of the DSI low-level protocol layer. Different real-life scenarios between the host processor and the peripheral device are covered with 100% functional coverage and 93% code coverage.