ABSTRACT

This thesis develops semi-automated methods to generate test benches for VHDL models
of communication systems. To illustrate the methods, a VHDL model was constructed for the
speech-coding channel of the Global System for Mobile communication (GSM). GSM is the
Pan-European digital mobile telephony standard specified by the European Telecommunication
Standards Institute (ETSI). This thesis emphasizes the error detection and error correction
procedures that form an important part of the standard.
This paper investigates the influence of GSM speech coding . The three existing GSM
speech coder standards were considered. The whole TIMIT database was passed through these
coders, obtaining three transcoded databases.
The purpose of these coders is to compress the speech signal before its transmission,
reducing the number of bits needed in its digital representation, while keeping an acceptable
quality of the decoded output.
First, a test bench template was generated using Test bench Pro, a waveform generation
tool developed by SynaptiCAD. The template includes a random sequence of speech data. A
VHDL program was then developed as a user interface to control the simulation procedure.
Using the VHDL program, the user can select a test bench template and specify the input test
vectors. This program adds the users test vectors to the test bench template to create a final
VHDL test bench that is ready for simulation. The testing data is then encoded by the GSM
encoder models, passed through the noisy channel model that introduces errors into the data
stream and, finally, passed through the GSM decoder models which attempt to correct the
channel errors. Sophisticated error detection and error correction algorithms are used in the
encoder/decoder models to increase the reliability of data transmission over the noisy channel.
Finally, the original speech data is compared to the decoder output to detect any
remaining bit errors and to evaluate the several experiments were performed to illustrate the
various features of the automated test bench generation system.


Submitted By
Shankha Mitra Sunani