An Organized Firmware Verification Environment for the Programmable Image DSP

Abstract

Our newly designed IDSP (Image Digita.1 Signal Processor)[1] requires a high throughput of at. least 300 NIOPS for real-time video signal processing systems (especially, for one-hoard CCITT standard p x 64 kb/s video codec ones) to enable both the parallel processing of plural pixel blocks and development in short TAT (turn-around-time). Moreover, t#he IDSP on the application systems requires soft,ware. IDSP testing, therefore, should be considered firmware testing, involving hardware and software verification. Iinpleinenting firmware test.ing, liowever, is a difficult task due to the necessity of verifying the real-time and parallel processing performance of’ the IDSP. The houiida.ry-scan tecliniciue devised by JTAG (Joint Test Action Group) is one attempt to debug a system wit11 multiprocessors.[’] 111 tliis t,echnique, a test bus controller assigns sciln paths on the system board that connects all processors’ and other devices’ scan paths and inputs and rea.ds serial data into a,nd from the a.ssigned scan path registers. However, scan path test pa,tterns, i.e., serial dat,a, have t.o he generakd for system testing. Generat,program-bus 1 programI sad-bus