Nexys 2 chipscope pro license

[JColvin]

A customer on our website asked the following question:

Hi all,

I have a nexys2 board that I bought in 2014 from farnell. I want to do spartan3 design but chipscope refuses to work in ISE14.7 webpack, with this error "ERROR:NgdBuild:1316 - A problem was encountered attempting to get the
ChipScopePro license. " .

I would really appreciate any assistance regarding this issue.

Thanks in advance.

The response is below.

[JColvin]

Hello,

Truthfully, the Xilinx Forums would be a better location to answer this question, but I'll see what I can do to help. 

I guess the first question I have is did you ever have a ChipScopePro license? If so, did you ever activate it? If you could attach the xinfo file that would also be helpful. You can generate the xinfo.txt file by going to the start menu -> start -> Xilinx ISE design suite -> Accessories -> xinfo system checker.

Thanks,
JColvin

[D@n]

You may not wish to limit yourself to Xilinx's proprietary chipscope.  There's a lot of stuff that can be done with a user created scope.  Indeed, I have yet to ever use Xilinx's chipscope--even on my Spartan 3 project(s).  Instead, I've always used something very similar to the Wishbone scope found here.  For that scope, I configure the memory length, the 32-bits I want to go into it, a trigger for when I want it to stop recording, and a hold-off for how many clocks I want it to wait from when I stop recording.

I've used this scope to debug ICAPE2 interfaces, QSPI interfaces, SD-card interactions, caches, bus'es, CPU's, and now even DDR3 SDRAM memories.  It's quite capable.  The two limitations are 1) that you need to have a working wishbone bus (although you might be able to modify it for an AXI bus), and 2) that it only records 32-bits at a time.  Sure, you can gang multiple of them together, but ... you'd still have to gang multiple together.

I wouldn't get down if I didn't have the license.  It's easy enough to work around,

Dan