Deep Trace & Bandwidth
Exostiv provides the following maximum capabilities for capturing data from inside FPGA running at speed:
Capabilities.
- 50 Gigabit per second bandwidth for collecting FPGA traces.
- 8 Gigabyte of memory for trace storage.
- 32,768 nodes probing simultaneously.
- 524,288 nodes reach.
We built EXOSTIV to provide visibility to the FPGA designer.
Interrupted captures are very useful too !
I was recently demonstrating Exostiv at a customer’s site and I received the following comment:
“Even with 50 Gbps bandwidth, this tool is hardly usable because you won’t see many nodes at a usual FPGA internal sampling frequency…”
This person was implying that – for example – probing more than 250 FPGA nodes at 200 MHz already exceeds this total bandwidth. So, Exostiv cannot be used to its fullest, right?
Wrong.
This reasoning is right if you think that only continuous captures are valuable for getting insight from FPGA.
The following short video explains why it is important. It features a case where the capture – from start to end – spans over 11 seconds ! . Depending on the trigger and data qualification (or data filtering options) – and by using the full provided trace data buffer (8GB) such an approach can let you observe specific moments of the FPGA in operation over hours !.
With the proper capture settings, EXOSTIV lets you observe FPGA over hours.
So, the features listed below are equally important for an efficient capture work.
Features.
- 16 capture units that can be enabled/disabled dynamically
- 16 multiplexed data groups per capture unit
- 8k samples local buffer in each capture unit.
- 1 trigger unit per capture unit. Defines start of capture.
- Bit or bus condition. =, /=, <, >, range, out of range conditions
- Repeating/interrupted capture based on trigger condition
- Data qualification condition on input data. Capture only when the condition is true.
- Interactive trigger or data qualification definition: no recompile needed
As always, thank you for reading (and for watching)
– Frederic
