Design and Verification of Efficient On-Chip Debugger for Core-A
Jing‐Zhe Xu, Hyung-Bae Park, Seungpyo Jung, Jusung Park · Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea · 2010
Nowadays, the SoC is watched by all over the world with interest. The design trend of the SoC is hardware and software co-design which includes the design of hardware structure in RTL level and the development of embedded software. Also the technology is toward deep-submicron and the observability of the SoC's internal state is not easy. Because of the above reasons, the SoC debug is very difficult and time-consuming. So we need a reliable debugger to find the bugs in the SoC and embedded software. In this paper, we developed a hardware debugger named OCD. It is based on IEEE 1140.1 JTAG standard. In order to verify the operation of OCD, it is integrated into the 32bit RISC processor - Core-A (Core-A is the unique embedded processor designed by Korea) and is tested by interconnecting with software debugger. When embedding the OCD in Core-A, there is 14.7% gate count overhead. We can modify the DCU which occupies 2% gate count in OCD to adapt with other processors as a debugger.