FPGA 13/13 · Stack Claude — The Answerable Question

The problem

FPGA debugging often devolves into guesswork based on vague symptoms like "it doesn't work on hardware." Without a minimal reproducible example or verbatim error logs, developers waste days chasing symptoms at the wrong stage of the design cycle.

What it does

• Reduces complex FPGA projects into the smallest possible reproducible code examples to isolate faults.
• Extracts verbatim error messages and environment metadata to eliminate ambiguity in diagnostics.
• Routes symptoms to specific design stages using a prioritized checklist, targeting the cheapest fixes first.
• Enforces rigorous counter-testing to prove root causes by toggling the error on and off.
• Generates structured help packages containing frozen states, bitstream hashes, and logs when local debugging hits a stop rule.

Frameworks & tools

FPGA synthesis and simulation tools including Vivado, Quartus, and Libero. Supports hardware debugging across various development boards and constraints files.

Why this beats prompting it yourself

Standard LLMs often suggest generic fixes that mask underlying hardware issues. This skill enforces a strict debugging discipline, preventing the "favorite station" bias where developers look for errors in their code while a jumper or constraints file is the actual culprit.

Use cases

• Isolating why a design passes simulation but fails after a power cycle on the board.
• Converting a massive repository into a single-file test case for vendor support tickets.
• Diagnosing sporadic, load-dependent errors that suggest clock domain crossing issues.
• Identifying whether a timing failure is a real logic path issue or a constraint mismatch.

Known limitations

Requires the user to provide exact tool versions and hardware specifications for accurate routing. It cannot physically probe hardware and relies on the user to execute the suggested checks.