Integration enables vendor independent debugging

Today’s silicon chips can incorporate over a billion transistors and are constructed from many tens of different functional blocks, mixing purchased processor cores, IP re-used from previous designs and custom logic developed by the design team itself - they also run substantial amounts of software. This complexity makes it very difficult to understand the behaviour of the complete system when it is finally pieced together - even for the engineers who designed and developed it. This in turn can lead to chips that do not deliver the expected performance, or contain hard to find bugs, leading to significant extra engineering costs, products that miss their market window, and occasionally even field failures. UltraSoC and Lauterbach’s collaboration aims to address these problems.

TRACE32 is a set of modular embedded development tools with integrated debug environments that 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 - and the device as a whole - non-intrusively and at wire speed. Together, TRACE32 and UltraSoC’s IP 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.

“We’re delighted to be working with Lauterbach, the global market leader in development tools for embedded systems,” said Rupert Baines, UltraSoC CEO. “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. The fit between our products couldn’t be better.”

Norbert Weiss, Head of Sales and Marketing at Lauterbach, commented: “The combination of TRACE32 and UltraSoC is a powerful one. 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 buses and custom logic, in addition to our existing support for all of the common embedded processors. UltraSoC’s message-based on-chip infrastructure and high speed external interface capabilities - USB for example - open up a range of new possibilities for users of our development tools.”

TRACE32 debug tools provide quick, effective debugging for more than 80 processor architectures, with full support for the entire debug process, including run control, OS-support, multi-core debugging and on-chip trace. The debugger supports multiple programming languages, most compilers and hosts, and a broad variety of multi-core architectures. Interfacing the UltraSoC on-chip debug and analytics fabric with TRACE32 gives users full control over the debug features of UltraSoC’s silicon IP, and full 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 any third party processor core, bus or custom logic block. This ability to create a holistic, overarching development and analytics solution is key to solving the tricky problems posed by heterogeneous multi-core SoCs running complex software.