Connect to your design, anywhere

When functionality is moved inside an FPGA the soft design can’t be probed, tested and monitored in the traditional way. The logic hardware programmed into the device is inaccessible, so as a designer, you can’t get a clear picture of what’s going on in the design. But there’s now a new way to access FPGA-based designs, both during design and when it’s been released to market, and anyone with a PC can do it.

Accessing the design inside an FPGA at development time is one of the challenges of ‘soft’ design. Embedded designers traditionally rely on complex FPGA circuit simulation, and use up valuable FPGA pins to bring out key signal and data lines for monitoring purposes.

Altium Designer avoids these compromises by providing FPGA-based virtual instruments that carry out the typical functions found in bench-top test instruments. The hardware portion of the instrument is connected into the design at the schematic level and downloaded to the FPGA along with the circuit under development. The instrument is then controlled via JTAG using soft front panels available within the Altium Designer environment.

With the summer 08 release of Altium Designer, Altium added a new dimension to the concept with the introduction of a fully-configurable Custom Instrument. This allows you to construct your own instrument to monitor and control signals within the FPGA.

Extending this concept to an even more practical level, the winter 09 release of Altium Designer has introduced a stand-alone instrument viewer that can be downloaded and installed on any PC – the Field Dashboard for FPGA-based Instruments.

This lets anyone with a PC view data from virtual instruments embedded in a design, and communicate with those devices. It removes the need to have Altium Designer installed in order to interact with the instruments, and is ideal for creating FPGA-based soft instruments that can be easily accessed in the field for servicing, maintenance and the provision of advanced services.

The instrument Dashboard

The Altium Instrument Dashboard is a small, standalone application, accessible from the Windows System Tray.

In practice, you simply connect your PC or laptop to the design, say via the Altium USB JTAG adapter, and launch the Dashboard. Once live, it essentially ’scans’ the Soft Devices JTAG chain for any virtual instruments that it supports and displays them accordingly on the desktop.

The Dashboard has been built primarily to access embedded Custom Instruments that you create, but the following standard Altium Designer instruments are also supported:

  • Frequency Generator
  • Frequency Counter
  • Terminal Console
  • Legacy Digital IO Modules

Standard instruments display in a standard Dashboard Instrument Rack panel, however Custom Instruments can be configured to display in either the standard format or as a custom, standalone panel.

The custom instruments viewer application lets designers extend virtual instrumentation beyond the design phase, and harness its power to create next generation products with in-built test instrumentation. This not only provides field engineers with an easy way to monitor and interact with product designs, but also opens the possibility of remotely controlling and testing designs using wireless technology or the internet.

Check out the FPGA Field Instrumentation video, where Matt shows you how.

Download the Altium Instrument Dashboard application (16.9MB zip)