Last week, we finished up 2 busy days at DesignCon 2016 at the Santa Clara Convention Center. DesignCon is a conference primarily for design, verification, and characterization engineers – so it is a great conference to show off our USB, I2C, SPI and CAN debug tools. And we spent plenty of time giving demos of each our products to interested engineers.

I’m working on a project with teams distributed in several different locations. I would like to share details of a data capture from a Beagle USB 480 Protocol Analyzer, but the other teams don’t have the device. How can they view the details of the captured data stored in a TDC file. I would rather not send them a series of screen shots from Data Center.

Total Phase now supports eSPI, a brand-new protocol introduced to replace LPC on motherboard bring up in PCs and servers.  With our new eSPI Analysis Application, the Promira Serial Platform can now be used to monitor eSPI messages in real time.  Using the SPI Active applications it is possible to generate eSPI messages. This article shows how to send eSPI data from a Promira platform with SPI Active Level 1-3 applications and Promira API, which will be monitored with another Promira platform with the eSPI Analysis Application and the Data Center Software.

I am using the Aardvark I2C/SPI Host Adapter and LabVIEW to communicate with an SPI slave device. The Aardvark I2C/SPI Host Adapter User Manual mentions using a pull-up resistor for the Slave Select (SS) line. I am using an adapter cable to connect the Aardvark adapter to the board. I only have one voltage source connected, which is to power the main board of the SPI device. I have some questions about setting this up:

I’m using the Cheetah SPI Host Adapter to send command frames at specific intervals.  It appears the Cheetah adapter has a scheduler based sleep function in cheetah.dll which is currently set at a tick rate of 1 ms. For my project, I need to send command frames every 2 ms. Do you have a multimedia timer or some other way to schedule the sleep function?

I need to run some tests with a new SPI device using a host adapter as an SPI slave to transfer data files to an SPI master. Will you please suggest which Total Phase tools I could use? Here are some additional questions:

How do I send data using the Aardvark adapter in slave mode? For other tests, such as validating the MISO line, is there any way I can use the Aardvark adapter in mode with the DUT?

I want to capture the behavior of USB 3.0 device using USB-HDD for recording TV programs over periods of time ranging from a few minutes to up to 8 hours.