System Console

System Console provides visibility into your design and allows you to perform system-level debug on an FPGA at run-time. System Console performs tests on debug-enabled Intel® FPGA IP. A variety of debug services provide read and write access to elements in your design. You can perform the following tasks with System Console, and the tools that System Console supports:

  • Perform board bring-up with finalized or partially complete designs.
  • Automate run-time verification through scripting across multiple devices.
  • Debug transceiver links, memory interfaces, and Ethernet interfaces with toolkits.
  • Integrate your debug IP into the debug platform.
  • Perform system verification with MATLAB® and Simulink.

The System Console GUI consists of a main window with the following panes that allow you to interact with the design currently running on the host computer:

  • Toolkit Explorer—displays all available toolkits and launches tools that use the System Console framework. When you load a design that contains debug-enabled IP, the Toolkit Explorer displays the design instances, along with a list of channels and channel collections for debugging. To interact with a channel or a toolkit, double-click on it to launch the Main View tabbed window.
  • System Explorer—displays a list of interactive instances in your design, including board connections, devices, designs, servers, and scripts. The System Explorer also displays custom toolkit groups and links that you create. System Explorer organizes the interactive instances according to the available device connections. The System Explorer contains a Links instance, and may contain a Files instance. The Links instance shows debug agents (and other hardware) that System Console can access. The Files instance contains information about the design files loaded from the Intel® Quartus® Prime project for the device.
  • Main View—allows you to visualize certain parameter values of the IP that the toolkit targets. These parameter values can be static values from compile-time parameterization, or dynamic values read from the hardware (like reading from CSR registers) at run-time.
  • Tcl Console—allows you to interact with your design using Tcl scripts, for example, sourcing scripts, writing procedures, and using System Console APIs.
  • Messages—displays status, warning, and error messages related to connections and debug actions.

The System Console GUI also provides the Autosweep, Dashboard, and Eye Viewer panes, that display as tabs in the Main View.