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

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.

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...

AI Technical Summary

Problems solved by technology

In order to save the output of all memory, it takes a lot of on-chip resources

[0007] (2) Because it takes up a lot of on-chip resources, the functions that can be realized by the FPGA chip are very small, and the operating frequency is also very low.

[0008] (3) Since the on-chip memory cannot be made very large, the length of the saveable waveform is very short

[0009] (4) Only the output data of the on-chip memory can be seen, but the contents of all units of the on-chip memory cannot be seen

Benchtop logic analyzers with large memory depths are very expensive

[0011] (6) Only applicable to FPGA, not ASIC

When designing an ASIC, after the first release, there are often errors

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