FPGA debug using incremental trace buffer

Design verification is an essential step in the development of any product. It ensures that the product as designed is the same as the product as intended. Software simulation is the common approach for validating hardware design unfortunately, it will take hours together to execute. Difficulties in validation arises due to the complexity of the design and also due to the lack of on chip observability. One common solution to this problem is to instrument the prototype using trace-buffers to record a subset of internal signals into on-chip memory for subsequent analysis. In the proposed system, an example circuit is implemented to perform the tracing operation and various trace buffers are designed to record the different stages of internal signal states. The resulting signal states are to be stored, like a error outputs. Low power methodologies are also implemented to achieve low power consumption. Thus the errors are separately stored in the memory for analyzing the signals. This might be used for changes in the logic wherever needed. Thus this tracing is performed to monitor signal states of an FPGA.Design verification is an essential step in the development of any product. It ensures that the product as designed is the same as the product as intended. Software simulation is the common approach for validating hardware design unfortunately, it will take hours together to execute. Difficulties in validation arises due to the complexity of the design and also due to the lack of on chip observability. One common solution to this problem is to instrument the prototype using trace-buffers to record a subset of internal signals into on-chip memory for subsequent analysis. In the proposed system, an example circuit is implemented to perform the tracing operation and various trace buffers are designed to record the different stages of internal signal states. The resulting signal states are to be stored, like a error outputs. Low power methodologies are also implemented to achieve low power consumption. Thus the errors are separately stored in the memory for analyzing the signals. This might be used for changes in the logic wherever needed. Thus this tracing is performed to monitor signal states of an FPGA