The complexity of today’s silicon chips makes it difficult to understand the behaviour of the complete system. This can lead to chips that do not deliver the expected performance, or contain hard-to-find bugs, leading to extra engineering costs, products that miss their market window, and field failures.
TRACE32 is a set of modular embedded development tools with integrated debug environments that is claimed to support all of the processor architectures commonly used in the market today. UltraSoC’s IP works inside the SoC itself, monitoring and analysing the real-world behaviour of any on-chip structure. TRACE32 and UltraSoC’s IP are said to give design teams complete visibility of the real-world behaviour of their devices – vital in the debugging process which can consume up to half of the total development effort for a typical SoC.
Norbert Weiss, head of sales and marketing at Lauterbach, said: “This integration allows users of our tools to gain an intimate understanding of the behaviour of the whole of the SoC, including all the on-chip structures such as busses and custom logic, in addition to our existing support for all of the common embedded processors.”
TRACE32 debug tools are claimed to provide quick, effective debugging for more than 80 processor architectures, with full support for the entire debug process, including run control, OS-support, multicore debugging and on-chip trace. The debugger supports multiple programming languages, most compilers and hosts, and a variety of multicore architectures. Interfacing the UltraSoC on-chip debug and analytics fabric with TRACE32 gives users control over the debug features of UltraSoC’s silicon IP, and access to the information generated by the company’s range of on-chip monitors and analytics engines.
As well as connecting externally with the debug host, the UltraSoC architecture includes an on-chip message-based interconnect, and allows monitoring of third party processor cores, buses or custom logic blocks. This ability to create a holistic, overarching development and analytics solution is key to solving the problems posed by heterogeneous multi-core SoCs running complex software.
Rupert Baines, UltraSoC CEO, said: “Both companies are committed to the concept of offering embedded designers a comprehensive range of high-quality IP-vendor-independent tools that they can use in developing their SoCs.”
