AVL-SPI - Apheleia Verification Library SPI Verification Component

AVL-SPI has been developed by experienced, industry professional verification engineers to provide a simple,
extensible verification component for the Serial Peripheral Interface
developed in Python and the AVL library.

AVL is built on the CocoTB framework, but aims to combine the best elements of
UVM in a more engineer friendly and efficient way.

CocoTB 2.0

AVL-SPI supports CocoTB 2.0 and requires CocoTB 2.1 or later.

Protocol Features

Note: At present only single bit, uni-directional SPI is supported. Each SCLK cycle transfers one bit on MOSI (master to slave) and one bit on MISO (slave to master). Bi-directional (3-wire), dual, quad and QPI modes are not supported.

Component Features

• Simple RTL interface to interact with HDL and define parameter and configuration options
• Multiple chip selects with individual polarity
• Clock polarity and individual drive and sample edges for master and slave (all 4 SPI modes and beyond)
• Variable transfer length, MSB or LSB first
• Chip select onehot0, setup, hold and inter-frame gap checks in the RTL interface
• Master sequence, sequencer and driver with rate limiter, SCLK frequency and chip select timing control
• Slave sequence, sequencer and driver with vanilla, random and memory response patterns
• Monitor
• Bandwidth monitor generating bus activity plots over user defined windows during simulation
• Functional coverage
• Searchable trace file generation

📦 Installation

Using pip

# Standard build
pip install avl-spi

# Development build
pip install avl-spi[dev]

Install from Source

git clone https://github.com/projectapheleia/avl-spi.git
cd avl-spi

# Standard build
pip install .

# Development build
pip install .[dev]

Alternatively if you want to create a virtual environment rather than install globally a script is provided. This will install, with edit privileges to local virtual environment.

This script assumes you have Graphviz and appropriate simulator installed, so all examples and documentation will build out of the box.

git clone https://github.com/projectapheleia/avl-spi.git
cd avl-spi
source avl-spi.sh

📖 Documentation

In order to build the documentation you must have installed the development build.

Build from Source

cd doc
make html
<browser> build/html/index.html

🏃 Examples

In order to run all the examples you must have installed the development build.

To run all examples:

cd examples

# To run
make -j 8 sim

# To clean
make -j 8 clean

To run an individual example:

cd examples/THE EXAMPLE YOU WANT

# To run
make sim

# To clean
make clean

The examples use the CocoTB Makefile and default to Verilator with all waveforms generated. This can be modified using the standard CocoTB build system.

🧹 Code Style & Linting

This project uses Ruff for linting and formatting.

Check code for issues:

ruff check .

Automatically fix common issues:

ruff check . --fix

📧 Contact

• Email: avl@projectapheleia.net
• GitHub: projectapheleia