Using Chipscope

Many people in the lab use Chipscope to debug hardware designs running on a target FPGA. While Chipscope is an extremely useful tool, getting it to work is not always easy. This page is designed as an aggregation point for tips, tricks, and tutorials on how to use Chipscope effectively, and how to swing at any of the curveballs it might throw at you.

Tutorials

Getting started with Chipscope

1. What is Chipscope? How do I use it?

Inserting Chipscope Cores

1. Using inserter.sh to insert Chipscope cores into netlists
2. Using gengui.sh to create Chipscope cores for manual insertion

Tips and Tricks

Do you often run into a particular problem? Share your favorite way of solving that problem.

1. When manually inserting Chipscope modules into a design containing a Microblaze (generated using the EDK and XPS), you may get a packing error saying that the design is too large for the specified part. Most likely the design summary section of the report generated by the mapping tool will complain that you are overusing your BSCAN ports (boundary scan, ie JTAG). This is likely because the Microblaze debug module, which sits on the OPB bus, is also using the JTAG port. To fix this problem, either find the setting to make the debug unit "allow" Chipscope, or simply remove the debug unit. Warning: XPS does not always do a clean job of removing the debug module. You may need to comment out some lines in the system.mhs file (under the microblaze block there will be some parameters starting with DBG_ . . .)

-- AlexMarschner - 15 Feb 2007