In order to test my GPIO design whose width can vary from 1 to 64 bits I need to be able to generate random values to properly drive it’s data line. I need a method that’s fast and fairly random as it will run for many repetitions. Before that I’ve Read more…
As part of my efforts to create “perfect” test benches I am to make sure the test benches work when compiled with different simulators. This approach is to expose language errors and any bugs in one of the simulators. Hence, I’ve tried to compile my test bench with Verilator and the process wasn’t Read more…
In the previous post, Testing like a Pro, I explained some general guidelines to thoroughly verify the behavior of an RTL design. I’ve been working on the test bench for the GPIO over the past week. In this post I’ll explain it’s features and give a block diagram to two Read more…
We are now using XCFE in Aeste, probably because it’s supposed to be a “light” desktop environment. However, I didn’t fancy it’s looks and absence of keyboard shortcuts similar to Ubuntu. Hence I took some time to make my desktop environment usable and setup some keyboard shortcuts. You can find Read more…
This is my last post for the entire internship that I had gone through in AESTE Works. To sum up the work for this week, I did the cleanup and pushing to Github. The porting of FreeRTOS to the latest AEMB2 was not yet complete, but most of the relative Read more…
The critical region is where only one task will run on FreeRTOS and that task will continue to run until it exits the critical region. There will not be any other task running during that phase. For the older AEMB2 with only one active thread, the FreeRTOS will disable the Read more…
AEMB has just been updated last week. The fix will prevent the tasks from breaking out of their loop. This solves the problem I faced last time where the tasks run and goes into the main function. Therefore, the new AEMB will need to be tested again to check for Read more…
Continuing from the previous test, an in depth look is taken on the output on AEMB. The GTKWave shows that the AEMB actually stop running anything at all on one thread . This is a huge error and means that the task not only stop running, but the FreeRTOS stops Read more…
Regarding my previous post on the interrupt crashing the FreeRTOS tasks, I went and research on the method used for enabling and disabling interrupts on AEMB through software. There are two simple functions used to do the job, which are portDISABLE_INTERRUPTS() and portENABLE_INTERRUPTS(). These two functions will disable and enable Read more…
I would like to look deeper into the application of FreeRTOS interrupts on the latest version of AEMB. It is important to be able to clearly identify the context switching by the interrupt on both threads of AEMB. To look more into the interrupts, the tasks are written with longer Read more…