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A colleague and I were hoping to set up unattended ILA data collection 
over long periods and changing conditions.  I assumed that the ChipScope 
TCL support would provide a way to do that, but when I look more closely 
at the ChipScope Engine JTAG Tcl Interface, I find that most of its API 
provides only very low-level functionality.

The API in question supports interrogating a device as to its number of 
ILA cores, but beyond that, all of the transactions would have to happen 
through JTAG data/instruction shift commands.  I had hoped that the ICON 
or ILA documentation might at least describe the pertinent registers in 
those cores, but I seem unable even to find that, and all of my googling 
has been fruitless.

Can it really be that nobody else has worked out unattended data 
collection with ChipScope?  Please dispel that notion for me.  Any 
pointers or suggestions would be appreciated.

______________________________
Newest Blog by Chris Felton: "The Spartans". Click here to read.

On Jan 22, 2:59=A0pm, Neil Steiner <neil.stei...@east.isi.edu> wrote:
> A colleague and I were hoping to set up unattended ILA data collection
> over long periods and changing conditions. =A0I assumed that the ChipScop=
e
> TCL support would provide a way to do that, but when I look more closely
> at the ChipScope Engine JTAG Tcl Interface, I find that most of its API
> provides only very low-level functionality.
>
> The API in question supports interrogating a device as to its number of
> ILA cores, but beyond that, all of the transactions would have to happen
> through JTAG data/instruction shift commands. =A0I had hoped that the ICO=
N
> or ILA documentation might at least describe the pertinent registers in
> those cores, but I seem unable even to find that, and all of my googling
> has been fruitless.
>
> Can it really be that nobody else has worked out unattended data
> collection with ChipScope? =A0Please dispel that notion for me. =A0Any
> pointers or suggestions would be appreciated.

I've been using Chipscope for 5 years now and the lack of high-level
scripting is one of my major complaints (the other being that the UI
bogs down when you create complex projects). It's fairly disappointing
that it's so difficult to build complex testing environments with
Chipscope - it seems like something that wouldn't be too hard to
support.

I ended up creating custom logic blocks to handle this which I
interface via a SPI port to an off-chip ARM processor, then to a PC
via USB. Not nearly as elegant as it could be if Chipscope had a
somewhat higher-level API.

Eric

______________________________
Newest Blog by Chris Felton: "The Spartans". Click here to read.