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

Abstract

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.