A Breakpoint-Based Silicon Debug Technique with Cycle-Granularity for Handshake-Based SoC

• Main Authors: Hsin-ChenChen, 陳信辰
• Other Authors: Kuen-Jong Lee
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2013
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/64854603956556705546

碩士 === 國立成功大學 === 電機工程學系碩博士班 === 101 === The breakpoint-based silicon debug approach allows users to stop normal operations of the circuits under debug (CUDs), extract the internal states of the CUDs for examination, and then resume normal system operations for further breakpoint setting. This approach has been applied to handshake-based SoCs. However, previously this approach is mainly at transaction-level granularity, i.e., the CUDs can be stopped only when a transaction is completed. The granulation at transaction level is often too coarse when a transaction requires a large number of cycles to complete. In this work, we present a novel debug mechanism, called the protocol agent, which allows the breakpoint-based debug technique to be applied at cycle-level granularity. The protocol agent is capable of dealing with the transaction invalidation and the protocol violation problems that may occur when a system is to be resumed from an incomplete transaction; thereby it can greatly enhance the flexibility and efficiency of the silicon debug process. Experimental results show that the area overhead of the protocol agent is quite low and the performance impact on the system is negligible. A case study with an industry design on Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) prototyping board validates the correctness, effectiveness and efficiency of the protocol agent mechanism on an SoC.