ChipScope is an IP core provided by Xilinx/AMD for many of their series FPGA chips. When installed it can capture analog and digital signals for any specific net/wire. In that, conceptually, it is not dissimilar from Oscilloscope. The difference being that it can provide access to signals inside the chip which are not routed out to chip pads and pins. In the lab it is commonly triggered through Vivado IDE which produces a csv file with each column holding a trace, column name being name of trace. While generated file is technically a csv file its interpretation by common tools like Excel and others is challenging as second row typically contains radix information for each column such as HEX, SIGNED, UNSIGNED and so on. This is intended for correct interpretation of numerical values in each trace column. Regardless of that Excel is often use to plot and analyze traces. This is very slow and error-prone. Additionally, Vivado will normally override the same csv file making it difficult to track history of the traces, i.e. being able to see how any given trace looked like before and after some change to the Verilog code was applied.
"Trace Tool" (TT), is an application that addresses above-mentioned issues and also provides additional functionality of annotating traces, creating trace views for presentation and analysis, tracking history of any given trace and so on.
Trace Tool video tutorials are available here.
Trace Tool is written in python 3.13 and can be installed on Windows, Mac or Linux. Snippets below address Windows installation.
First you need to ensure that uv (application for managing python
and python based applications) is installed. You can skip this step if uv is already installed.
winget install --id=astral-sh.uv -eOnce uv is installed run
uv tool install --cache-dir .cache -p 3.13.1 --force git+https://github.com/priimak/tt.git@release This will install latest release of Trace Tool. It will be available as tt.exe in PowerShell.
You can now run it from PowerShell by simply typing
ttIf new release of Trace Tool is available, you can update previously installed version to the latest one by running following command in PowerShell
uv tool upgrade tt