Development of a verification environment to capture the functional coverage of PUCCH features in 5G User Equipment Simulator

Abstract

The fifth generation of wireless mobile network, known as 5G NR (New Radio) is in the process of being designed and deployed. NR follows 3GPP series of standards for wireless network which includes gNB (base station) and UE (user equipment). The connection from User Equipment to gNodeB is known as Uplink, which includes PUCCH channel which is used to convey Control Information to the gNB. The features of the PUCCH in baseband of the UE simulator are modelled using HDL and implemented in FPGA (SoC). This paper proposes a way to develop environment that can be used to capture the functional coverage for the verification. The environment we developed is by using SystemVerilog with UVM framework. We used Python and Perl scripts to automate the process of verification. All the features which are intended to implement based on the specification can be exercised. Which will give 100% coverage, that is closer to the realworld application. This will enables telecommunication industry to make their product more reliable and less time in design cycle. Our work involves the development of the testbench environment and scripts which automatically captures the functional coverage of the feature-based verification process. This can also be helpful in the functional coverage of different channels in any Baseband unit and this environment is not limited to 5G, can be used for 4G LTE or in future 6G.