Long-term on-chip verification of systems with logical events scattered in time

Traditional on-chip and off-chip logic analyzers present important shortcomings when used for the longterm verification of industrial embedded systems, forcing the designer to implement ad hoc verification solutions. This paper introduces a suitable solution for long-term verification of FPGA-based...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Viejo Cortés, Julián, Villar de Ossorno, José Ignacio, Juan Chico, Jorge, Millán Calderón, Alejandro, Ostúa Arangüena, Enrique, Quirós Carmona, Juan
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Estado:Versión enviada para evaluación y publicación
Fecha de publicación:2012
País:España
Institución:Universidad de Sevilla (US)
Repositorio:idUS. Depósito de Investigación de la Universidad de Sevilla
OAI Identifier:oai:idus.us.es:11441/62510
Acceso en línea:http://hdl.handle.net/11441/62510
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.micpro.2012.02.005
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:FPGA
Long-term verification
On-chip verification
PicoBlaze
Descripción
Sumario:Traditional on-chip and off-chip logic analyzers present important shortcomings when used for the longterm verification of industrial embedded systems, forcing the designer to implement ad hoc verification solutions. This paper introduces a suitable solution for long-term verification of FPGA-based designs consisting of a verification core that uses the PicoBlaze microcontroller, dedicated logic and a serial port communication in order to monitor the internal signals of the system in a continuous way. The core design focuses on low resource requirements and has been successfully applied to the verification of a real industrial synchronization platform showing remarkable advantages over commercial on-chip solutions like Xilinx’s ChipScope Pro. Moreover, in order to improve the reusability of this core a software tool has been developed to automatically include the verification core in any specific system.