Method and system for observing all signals inside programmable digital IC chip

A technology for integrated circuits and test systems, which is applied in the field of testing and verification of programmable digital integrated circuit chips, and can solve problems such as short waveform length, errors, and inability to be used in ASICs.

CN1507026AInactive Publication Date: 2004-06-23长江微电子技术(大连)有限公司
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Patent Information

Authority / Receiving Office
CN · China
Current Assignee / Owner
Publication Date
2004-06-23
Estimated Expiration
Not applicable · inactive patent

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Abstract

The present invention is method for real-time and on-line observing all the signal waveforms inside programmable digital IC chip, including various types of memory chip. The observing point may be any time after the measured system begins to operate, and the length of signal waveform to be collected is not limited by the internal resource of the programmable digital IC chip. The design of the digital IC is written into two identical programmable digital IC chips with similar operation process but a time difference of N clocks and capable of being stopped in any time instant. The states of chip registers and memories in the stop time may be read out and are combined with the signals collected from the chip pins to predict the state signals of the combination circuit inside the chip. Further processing of these data can obtain the waveforms of all the signals inside the chip.
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Description

technical field

[0001] The invention relates to the testing and verification of programmable digital integrated circuit chips, in particular to a method and system capable of observing the waveforms of all signals inside the programmable digital integrated circuit chip in real time and on-line. The method and system can be used both as a logic analyzer for testing circuit boards and as a hardware emulator for verifying IC designs. Background technique

[0002] With the development of semiconductor integrated circuit technology, the integration of chips is higher, and the functions of programmable digital integrated circuit chips are more complex. Programmable application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and programmable logic devices ( PLD) is very popular, and there is a system on a chip (SOC) (System On a Chip), which integrates the entire system on a chip, not only has CPU, memory and I / O interface, but also complex algorithm mo...

Examples

Embodiment Construction

[0054] The present invention will be further described below in conjunction with the accompanying drawings and embodiments.

[0055] The composition of the entire test system, such as Figure 4 As shown, the host computer can be a microcomputer or a workstation, and the preprocessing program, postprocessing program, software emulator and system control program all run on the host computer. The test system composed of back-end chip, "signal, delay and storage module" and "clock, trigger and stop logic" is installed in a separate chassis, and it is connected to the microcomputer through PCI bus or USB bus. The front-end chip is installed on the circuit board under test to realize real-time and online testing. Cables are used between the front-end chip and the test system to send the signals on the pins of all the front-end chips to the chassis of the test system. In order to increase the transmission rate of cables, it is necessary to expand the number of cables and distribute...