Using Chipscope and SDK at the same time

Today I was having problems debugging a design in Chipscope and SDK. For some reason, every time I used the Chipscope trigger (either the armed trigger or immediate) the Microblaze would reset or jump to another part of the code. I figured that Chipscope was messing with the stack pointer but I couldn’t find anything in the forums for such a problem. I finally came across a solution here: [14.6] SDK and Chipscope do not work together [Read More]

Clocks, resets and wild goose chases

There’s a problem that I believe costs design companies billions of dollars a year whether they’re in hardware, software or FPGA design. The problem is hard to control, difficult to monitor and impossible to predict. The problem is bad design practice. Some people call everything “bugs”, but I prefer to call this problem poor design. It is what happens when you do those late-nighters and you’re too tired to see all the loose-ends you’re leaving in your code, or when you don’t have time to test every use case because the product release is yesterday. [Read More]