Exostiv FPGA Debugging Might be a Bargain

Got $4,000 to spend? Even if you don’t, keep reading — especially if you develop with FPGAs. Exostiv’s FPGA debugging setup costs around $4K although if you are in need of debugging a complex FPGA design and your time has any value, that might not be very expensive. Then again, most of us have a lot of trouble justifying a $4,000 piece of test gear. But we wanted to think about what Exostiv is doing and why we don’t see more of it. Traditionally, debugging FPGAs meant using JTAG and possibly some custom blocks that act like a logic analyzer and chew up real estate on your device. Exostiv also uses some of your device, but instead of building a JTAG-communicating logic analyzer it… well, here’s what their website says:

EXOSTIV IP uses the MGTs (Multi-Gigabit Transceivers) to flow captured data out of the FPGA to an external memory. EXOSTIV IP supports repeating captures of up to 32,768 internal nodes simultaneously at the FPGA’s speed of operation (16 data sets x 2,048 bits).

EXOSTIV IP provides dynamic multiplexer controls to capture even more data sets without the need to recompile. Dynamic ON/OFF controls of data sets let you select the data set and preserve the MGT’s bandwidth for when deeper captures of a reduced set of data is required.

In a nutshell, this means they use high-speed communications to send raw data to a box that has memory and connects back to a PC. That means they can store more data, have more data come out of the chip over a certain time frame, and do sophisticated processing. You can see a video about the device below, and there are more detailed videos on their channel, as well.

There are two things you might be wondering. First, why not just send the data to the PC instead of an intermediate box. Notice the box has a USB 3 connection back to the PC. That’s fast, but it isn’t fast enough.

The other thing you might be wondering is why you’ve read this far since your boards don’t have MGTs and you don’t have $4,000 sitting around to buy a debugging tool. But it occurs to us, that while the implementation of this idea is very robust-seeming, there’s no reason we couldn’t adapt it to our FPGA designs. Why haven’t we seen a hacker design that uses a reasonably cheap and fast I/O (maybe LVDS) to pipe data to an Arm board with some memory. In fact, you would think you could separate the modules for the FPGA so you’d have a core and a communication channel that would allow different features.

Of course, open source debug cores are not unheard of, but they tend to work like traditional JTAG debuggers where you essentially build a logic analyzer on the spare parts of your FPGA. We haven’t seen anything like the Exostiv solution. Probably the closest we’ve seen is this device from Cornell, but it displays on a VGA monitor. There’s also no shortage of standalone logic analyzers that use FPGAs.