[Greg] has been working with the Tang Nano 9K FPGA board. He wanted to use the Gowin Analysis Oscilloscope (GAO) to build an internal monitor into the device for probing internal points. The problem is that the documentation is a bit lacking, so he made a video showing how to make it work to help us all out.

The idea for this isn’t unique, although for some vendors, getting this capability requires you to buy a license or the free versions are limited. We were disappointed, as was [Greg], that he had to run Windows to get the software to work.

The software seems capable, although we were interested in how much of the chip’s resources the integrated logic analyzer uses. We know from experience that being able to have a bird’s eye view of the signals inside the FPGA greatly simplifies debugging.

The Tang boards contain GWIN-1 FPGAs with different gate counts. We assume this software will work with any of the devices, regardless of the size. We’d love to know how to make this work on Linux, even if it takes a VM or WINE. In addition, the program has a number of options and features that either don’t work or aren’t clear what they are supposed to do. If you have any insight on any of this, be sure to share it with [Greg] and the rest of us.

We’ve rolled our own version of this that is portable. We’ve looked at this FPGA before and it is dirt cheap.