The most common use of an I2C interface is to send and receive data in compliance with the I2C specification. This implies that the device we are talking to is known to conform to the I2C standard, as well. However, there are situations in which this particular aspect of a device is to be tested, i.e. where the goal is to determine whether or not a device is fully compliant with the I2C specification and how this device behaves in case of ill-formed signals. Our negative tester is designed to fulfill all requirements introduced by this kind of application. It is capable of acting as master or as slave. In both roles it allows to control all relevant low-level aspects of bus communication, in particular it provides functionality to define the timing for each and every bit. It is even possible to send out patterns which violate the standard, e.g. make a "byte" six bits long. In slave mode the negative tester permits to stretch the clock at any time. The user has full control over arbitration handling in master mode. Further more, independent configurable output signals can be used to trigger external events or to flag certain states in real time.

A graphical user interface enables you to create complex test scenarios from existing elementary test steps without any programming. These test cases can be stored for later use and test reproduction.