Method and apparatus for testing high speed busses using gray- code data

摘要

An apparatus for providing data to an I/O bus at the maximum I/O bus bandwidth comprises an exerciser unit coupled to the I/O device. The exerciser unit includes DMA circuitry for providing a constant stream of transactions to the I/O bus. Each transaction provides a plurality of data quadwords to the I/O bus which are parity protected. The exerciser unit includes a memory device for storing data to be provided for each transaction, and a parity circuit for calculating and providing parity for the data stored in the memory. The exerciser unit further includes a data generation device for providing both data having predictable parity and the parity to the bus for each bus cycle while bypassing the parity generation logic to provide data at maximum bandwidth. The data generation device provides a sequence of different data bytes using a modified Gray-code algorithm, which facilitates parity generation for each byte in the sequence of bytes.