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Embedded Instruments

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FPGA: What they are when to use and when not and if then how?

antti-lukatsAntti Lukats 08/26/2015 at 20:203 Comments

As FPGAs can have many things working in parallel and may not contain an embedded processor at all then special tools are used for debugging. Most FPGA vendors have "embedded instruments" that can be added to your design and that provide visibility into the hardware.

Xilinx - Chipscope, now Vivado Labtools (requires paid license)

Altera - SignalTap (free)

Lattice - Reveal (free)

Microsemi - need to figure out

There are some attempts for platform neutral or cross platform embeded instruments, Altium is/has tried this and opencores OpenRisc seems to have something too.

Sump LA can of course also be used for internal debug..

Discussions

Yann Guidon / YGDES wrote 08/26/2015 at 22:35 point

HTTaP is something I try to design for this purpose :-)

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Antti Lukats wrote 08/26/2015 at 22:39 point

what is it?

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Yann Guidon / YGDES wrote 08/26/2015 at 23:13 point

it's a TAP over HTTP, without any proprietary part. Easily accessible with JavaScript (or anything else) and the HW TAP part is in HDL so it still works in ASIC.
I'm developing it along the YASEP system and IDE ;-)

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