Use ILA in CW305

1

Hi,

I am using Chip Whisperer target board CW305 and the capture board CW-lite. I am working on a custom hardware design and need to use the Integrated Logic Analyzer (ILA) of Vivado to check and debug my hardware on the board. However, I cannot connect CW305 to Vivado to be able to connect to the hardware server and trigger and read ILA traces. Is there a way to add ILA cores to the design in Vivado example for CW305 and read traces?

Thanks

2

Absolutely! Add the ILAs to your design. You will have to use the Xilinx platform cable (or equivalent, i.e. from Digilent) to program the FPGA bitfile from the Vivado HW manager.

Jean-Pierre

3

Any new developments now? I am also experiencing this problem and am getting the following error when connecting via the Xilinx cable:
[Labtools 27-2220] Launch Error.
Unable to launch local hw_server executable.
It looks like the host computer doesn’t recognize the CW305 at all.

4

The Xilinx platform cable connects directly to the FPGA’s JTAG port, so any issue here would be on the Xilinx side (i.e. this is totally independent of ChipWhisperer software). Did you install the Xilinx cable drivers? IIRC this is an optional part of the Vivado installation, but it’s absolutely required for this application.

5

Hello
Actually, it is not possible to connect to Vivado with the USB cable of the board CW305 ? Is there a way to connect to it with the USB port of the board itself?

6

No, the CW305’s USB cable only works for programming the FPGA with the ChipWhisperer Python API. It does not support ILAs.

For programming the FPGA from Vivado, and to use ILAs, then you need the Xilinx platform cable (or one of the cheaper alternatives e.g. from Digilent).