Cable Basics

The Hardware Debugger communicates with your device via a cable. The cable can be a serial, parallel, or XChecker cable. You can use any one of the three cables to download configuration data to a device or daisy chain of devices, but you can only use the XChecker cable to verify or debug.

Perform the following steps when connecting your cable.

• Determine the most suitable cable to use based on the tasks you wish to perform.
  
  
• Connect the cable to your host system.
  
  
• Configure the target board to accept the needed cable connections.
  
  
• Set your FPGA to slave serial mode configuration using the mode pins.
  
  
• Connect the cable to your target system.
  
  
• Power up the target board.
  
  
• Invoke the Hardware Debugger.
  
  
• Set the cable options from the Cable menu.