Fast debugging of serial buses in FPGA programmable gate arrays
Article provided by Agilent
Sub-megabit serial buses are found in most embedded FPGA designs. The inclusion of multi-gigabit serial buses in FPGAs is gaining favor. The ease of application, low cost, and backward compatibility with design blocks offered by serial buses make them ideal for a wide variety of applications in a large number of industries. Low-speed serial buses are widely used in the computing, semiconductor, aviation/defense, communications, automotive, medical, and measurement and test industries. Serial buses such as I2C, SPI, CAN, LIN, and RS-232 are typically critical points for debugging designs with FPGAs, whose higher-speed serial buses quickly transmit data from one chip to another. Historically, capturing and decoding information involved a great deal of manual effort if an oscilloscope was used, or the purchase of custom tools. Oscilloscope vendors now include a large number of applications that simplify debugging low-speed serial buses.
