EEVblog #58 - Warm and Fuzzy FPGA Troubleshooting

Look, up in the sky, is it a hardware fault?, is it a software fault?, no, it's a bloody FPGA

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• fpga
• altera
• xilinx
• fault
• troubleshoot
• silicon
• bug
• vhdl
• systhesis
• problem
• hardware
• software
• firmware

[FrancekPirosrancek]

so this is you at work or at home?

[EEVblog]

@FrancekPirosrancek it's my home lab.

[stormbytes]

Wow.. You must've been climbing the walls! Man! Thanks for sharing. That's a really good point. You had no choice but to go into the software to figure out what was going wrong. Speaking of troubleshooting, think you could do an episode on "Oscilloscope use in Basic Troubleshooting" ? :) there's a thought!

[baddspella]

Post more offten Dave :)

[KingKongSamurai]

@SianaGearz Sure, you can argue about it like that. But In academics and pretty much everywhere in the industry, HDL layer is a hardware layer. Its convenient, but very misleading to call it software. Software is a very general term for a program/routine that run on a processor. HDL(Hardware) is coding a digital logic circuit. Very different paradigms. I can design a CPU using HDL(hardware), on which I can load a program(software) on it.

[SianaGearz]

@KingKongSamurai Point of view thing. If you're a C programmer, HDL is hardware, if you're a board designer, HDL is software. I'd easily call it software, because if you think back to the origin terms, hardware is part of the computing equipment you can't change once it's out, software is something that can be changed. I don't see why it matters whether it's written in command-oriented language or one describing hardware-like structures.

[gryzman]

they are americans, freedom isn't their strongest suit these days

[KingKongSamurai]

You didnt include the SPI controller in SOPC builder. Verilog is still considered hardware, not software. So it is a hardware problem, not software.

[frankm81m82]

First off I real;y enjoyed this video, but

I don't think you found/understand the root cause of this problem, Based on my experience the problem will most likely return at a most inopertune time. Keep digging if you have the time and money, I recommebd you use Altera's internal logic analyser(if you can) to get more insite, Great video though.

[Salamander014]

My favorite programming language is also solder :)

[CDMCSD2]

I would say it's not a good soft-core CPU you have used. Either it was not clear enough regardin the SPI protocol, or you missed a great thing in it.

Further more, it can be because of a default voltage level on one of the control pins, which happend to be ok accidentaly on that series of FPGAs, and not ok on the other series.

Funny enough, checking the FPGA is the first thing you should go through. I always put an LED on the board to show the sequence of booting. It helps...

[Films4You]

Solder, coding, is OPP. (Object oriented programming), if you use flux LOL