Debug of reconfigurable systems
T.E. Price, Delon Levi, Steven A. Guccione · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2000
While FPGA design tools have progressed steadily, availability of tools to aid in debug of FPGA-based systems has lagged. In particular, support for debug of run-time reconfigurable (RTR) systems have been all but absent. In this paper we describe DDTScript, a scripting language to aid in design, debug and test of RTR systems. The DDTScript language is fully integrated with the BoardScope graphical debug tool and permits parameterization, instantiation, and removal of Run-time Parameterizable (RTP) Cores and other configurable circuit components. DDTScript also provides control of system level resources and supplies access to device state and configuration data. DDTScript is currently used not only to test and debug RTP Cores, but to construct and interact with complete designs. DDTScript is currently part of the JBits tool suite and supports the Xilinx Virtex family of FPGA devices.