Functional Testing of Microprocessor Peripheral Drivers for Nano Satellites

This paper explain about the work which I have done to test the peripheral drivers of MSP430 micro-
controller families. The driver dene all the operations and settings of MSP430F5xx, MSP430F4xx,
MSP430FG41xx and MSP430F2xx families of microcontrollers. The drivers have been written in
C++.
The test program used to test the driver unites by conguring and setting the microcontroller based
on the operation and setting dened in the drivers. When the microcontroller peripheral behave dif-
ferently than expected after they are congured with the existed drivers, I had to determine the fault
code and modied the driver unit. For doing this I have to know about the structure and character-
istics of MSP430 microcontroller.
Microcontroller based applications are usually debugged with the assistance of In-circuit emulators
and logic analyzers. However, these traditional debug tools represent a huge investment for use. The
development of a new low-cost debug tool that uses functional test to implement the basic function-
ality provided by an In-circuit emulator and a logic analyzer is a possible solution to overcome this
economical problem.
A test developed on the basis of the functional information about the module under test aims at
testing the functions rather than the faults (black box testing).
For developing the test the system use PC which used to run the software IAR Embedded Workbench
Software and MSP-TS430PZ5x100 program development tool from Texas Instrument which allows
programming and debugging of the microcontroller through JTAG interface. The system allows test-
ing of the following peripheral drivers: Clock Generator, Timer, ADC, PWM, FLASH, CRC and
USCI Modules (UART, SPI and I2C).
This paper rst give a detailed introduction about the module and then it shows how to congure
the module and how the functional test is performed. Finally it conclude the by analyzing the result
found from the test.