Debugging Techniques for Dynamically Reconfigurable Hardware.pdfVIP

Debugging Techniques for Dynamically Reconfigurable Hardware Nicholas McKay Satnam Singh Dept. Computing Science Xilinx Inc. The University of Glasgow, U.K. San Jose, California, U.S.A. nicholas@dcs.gla.ac.uk Satnam.Singh@ Abstract First we describe the background of this work which relates to a project for creating dynamically specialisable cir- Testing dynamically reconfigurable systems imposes new cuits and relate our approach to other researchers’s methods. challenges which require special treatment. We present tools Then we present a custom made tool that lets us monitor how and techniques we developed for debugging a dynamically circuits are specialised which has proved invaluable for reconfigurable system that performs run-time constant prop- debugging our applications. As a case study we use a multi- agation optimisations. An application for monitoring the ef- plier which is dynamically specialised and we show how we fect of run-time specialisation is presented and we show how re-applied standard testability techniques to help us debug the we adapted standard testability techniques to evaluate the dynamically specialisable implementation of this circuit. We performance of specialised circuits. We also outline how also describe how we used test equipment like logical analys- HDLs that capture reconfiguration at a high level can assist ers to facilitate debugging.