Online Analysis of Debug Trace Data for Embedded Systems

Modern multi-core Systems-on-Chip (SoC) provide very high computational power. On the downside, they are hard to debug and it is often very difficult to understand what is going on in these chips because of the limited observability inside the SoC. Chip manufacturers try to compensate this difficulty by providing highly compressed trace data from the individual cores. In the past, the common way to deal with this data was storing it for later offline analysis, which severely limits the time span that can be observed. In this contribution, we present an FPGA-based solution that is able to process the trace data in real-time, enabling continuous observation of the state of a core. Moreover, we discuss applications enabled by this technology.