Design and implementation of a suitable core for on-chip long-term verification

Traditional on-chip and off-chip logic analyzers present important shortcomings when used for the long-term verification of industrial embedded systems, forcing the designer to implement ad-hoc verification solutions. This contribution presents a suitable solution for long-term verification of FPGA-based designs consisting on a verification core that uses the Picoblaze microcontroller, dedicated logic and a serial port communication in order to monitor the internal signals of the system in a continuous way. The core design focuses on low resource requirements and reusability and has been successfully applied to the verification of a real industrial synchronization platform showing remarkable advantages over commercial on-chip solutions like Xilinx's ChipScope Pro.