How to tb.fst through gtkwave

1

Hi, I am learning the ECC attack, and wanted a closer look at the codes. I was able to install iverilog and run the simulation. However I cannot open the tb.fst file through gtkwave. I have installed the gtkwave through ubuntu. So I was hoping to get some guidance on how to use the gtkwave through Chipwhisperer Jupyter notebook.

Thank you.

2

You can’t run gtkwave through Jupyter; you need to start it from the command line.
Please refer to the gtkwave documentation.

3

Thank you for clarifying that. But despite running through ubuntu and making sure I build the codes and yet I get the error that saying
Could not initialise tb.fst.
Is there something that should be done differently?

4

Go over the basics then…

  • Does tb.fst exist?
  • Were there any warnings or errors when you ran the make command?
5

Yes, I made sure to check all the basics:-

  1. Made sure tb.fst does exist and is written into when I run the make command.
  2. Made sure there are errors whiles running.
  3. Made sure that gtkwave is installed in the correct path.

Is there anything that has to be done and I skipped it?

6

I think I figured it out. Since the vvp command calls for vcd instead of fst in the make file, the gtkwave cannot initialise fst. I changed the tb.v to dump tb.vcd instead and now gtkwave can load that properly.

Thank you for your help.

7

That is strange, the makefile does not call for VCD (unless you changed it, or gave it a different WAVEFORMART argument): chipwhisperer/firmware/fpgas/ecc/sim/makefile at develop · newaetech/chipwhisperer · GitHub

8

I did not change anything in the make file, but in the bash commands for the verilog simulation in CW305_ECC_Part1, it runs with WAVEFORMAT=vcd. I believe that was why. Not sure if it is really the problem, as it seems to run fine for many others.