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A REVIEW ON ADVANCED PERIPHERAL BUS INTERFACE PROTOCOL
E.PRAVEEN1 YVNM SARMA 2The Advanced Peripheral Bus (APB) is a low-power, low-bandwidth bus that is part of the Advanced Microcontroller Bus Architecture (AMBA) developed by ARM. It is widely used to connect low-speed peripheral devices such as timers, UARTs, GPIOs, SPI, and I²C controllers in System-on-Chip (SoC) designs. Since APB is responsible for communication between the processor and peripheral devices, verifying its functionality is essential to ensure reliable data transfer and protocol compliance. This project presents the verification of the APB protocol using the Universal Verification Methodology (UVM). UVM is a standardized verification framework built on SystemVerilog that enables the development of reusable, scalable, and modular verification environments. The project implements a complete UVM-based testbench consisting of transaction objects, sequences, sequencer, driver, monitor, agent, environment, scoreboard, and functional coverage components to verify the APB design. The verification environment generates both directed and randomized read/write transactions to validate the APB protocol under different operating conditions. The monitor captures the DUT activity, while the scoreboard compares the expected and actual results to identify mismatches. Functional coverage is collected to ensure that all important protocol features, including read operations, write operations, valid address ranges, wait states, and transfer types, are exercised during simulation. Simulation results confirm that the APB design behaves according to the protocol specification, with successful verification of all functional scenarios. The UVM-based environment improves verification efficiency, enhances code reusability, and provides comprehensive functional coverage. This project demonstrates an industry-standard verification approach for AMBA APB and serves as a strong foundation for verifying more complex bus protocols such as AHB and AXI.
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