MSO8000 Datasheet, PDF (1/8 Pages) Agilent(Hewlett-Packard) – FPGA Dynamic Probe for Xilinx

Agilent Technologies
Infiniium MSO8000 and MSO9000 Series
N5433A FPGA Dynamic Probe for Altera
Data Sheet
The challenge
You rely on the insight a MSO
(mixed-signal oscilloscope)
provides to understand the
behavior of your FPGA in
the context of the surrounding
system. Design engineers
typically take advantage of the
programmability of the FPGA to
route internal nodes to a small
number of physical pins for
debugging. While this approach
is very useful, it has significant
limitations.
• Since pins on the FPGA
are typically an expensive
resource, there are a relatively
small number available for
debug. This limits internal
visibility (i.e. one pin is
required for each internal
signal to be probed).
• When you need to access
different internal signals,
you must change your design
to route these signals to the
available pins. This can be time
consuming and can affect the
timing of your FPGA design.
Figure 1. FPGA dynamic probe for Altera used in conjunction with an Agilent MSO
provides an effective solution for simple through complex debugging of systems
incorporating Altera FPGAs.
• Finally, the process required
to map the signal names from
your FPGA design to the
MSO digital channel labels is
manual and tedious.
When new signals are routed
out, you need to manually
update these signal names
on the MSO, which takes
additional time and is a
potential source of confusing
errors.