Friday, October 30, 2015

Planahead 14.7: Abnormal program termination (EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION)

May this be a lesson to future engineers working on critical applications. Always document your work especially right after crunch time. I ran into a problem with Xilinx Tools over a full year ago and managed to solve the issue. Skip forward to present day, I forgot I had solved the issue and then had to go through a huge painful process to re-solve it.

Problem: When I open a specific project ISE14.7 Crashes immediately only leaving the following message in the cmd window:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Abnormal program termination (EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION)
Please check 'C:/Users/user1/AppData/Roaming/Xilinx/PlanAhead/hs_err_pid7568.l
og' for details
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

When I check the log I see this:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
#
# An unexpected error has occurred (EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION)
#
Stack:
no stack trace available, please use hs_err_<pid>.dmp instead.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Turns out, that the solution is to roll back to a different version of the tools, for me, synthesizing in 14.7 and implementing in 14.2 worked out fine.