The Software/Hardware Co-

Debug Environment with Emulator

Baodong Yu, Xuecheng ZouDepartment of Electronic Science and TechnologyHuazhong University of Science and Technology

Presenter: Shao-Chieh Hou

International Database Engineering & Application Symposium (IDEAS’05)

It is a challenge to debug the software and hardware in the SOC for that neither the software nor the hardware is error-free. By combining the emulator and the simulator, with the new software debug engine, the new bus status monitor, and the new checkpoint technology, the high speed, easy-used software/hardware co-debugging environment is presented in this paper.

Abstact

The SoC Design become complex Consists

。Microprocessor。Memory。Another IP。Software

Time-to-market Integrate both software and hardware as soon as

possible

In this way, the SW/HW co-debug environment is needed

What’s the problem?

Related Works

This paper

JHDL debugger environment[1]-

[3]

JTAG use in debug[4]-[6]

Processor-base debug and bus monitor[5]

Software debug with JTAG[6]

SW debug engine[7]

Snapshot technology use in hardware

debug[8][9]

Hardware

Software

HDL selectData output

Internal data get

Software debug engine Goal: signal step, breakpoint, register modify

=> Data output /command input

=> Command decoder

=> Achieve the goal

=> Register modify and monitor

=> Run-Length encoder

JTAG:30MHZBandwidth:2.0875MB/s

Goal: monitor the bus status (both system bus and memory bus), and save data into a block-RAM

Bus Status Monitor

=> Bus status collect

=> Compress the bus status

=> Data output /command input

=> Control memory access

Goal: monitor other IP and signal in SoC

Infrastructure for HW debug

Scan cell for signal traceScan cell control

Signal capture and compressEmbedded logic

analyzer control

Software: Read register Breakpoint Step run

Hardware: Bus monitor Scan chain

32-bit REX CPU(100MIPS)

Result and Conclusion

Co-debug by match both HW signal and SW values

The paper give a good idea for “what the co-debug need both in SW and HW”

The paper idea is similar to our co-debug environment

The paper is lack of experimental result and detailed, but the main idea is useful in SW/HW co-debug.

My Commend