8.1.3 Hardware Probes

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PolarFire family of devices have built-in probe points that enhance the ability to debug design logic within a device through the live and active probe features. These enhanced debug features embedded into the device hardware provide access to logic elements and enable real-time monitoring of inputs and outputs without the need to recompile the design.

Live probes: Two dedicated probes can be configured to observe a probe point, which is the output of a register. After configuring, the probe data can be sent to two dedicated pins (PROBE_A and PROBE_B), and then to an oscilloscope.
Active probes: Active probes allow dynamic asynchronous read and write to/from a flip-flop or probe point. This capability helps you to observe the output of the logic and perform quick experiments to determine how the logic is affected if a probe point is written to.

In many cases, the hardware probe capabilities such as live probe can be used along with the Identify RTL debugger and external test techniques to debug issues in a subsystem.

For debugging LPDDR4 and DDR4 training issues, use Memory Log Analyzer GUI. This is only applicable for embedded DDR memory controller.