E
XHIBITION
H
IGHLIGHTS
33
February 2014
ger busses to the internal trace interface. The
trace interface itself does not know anything
about the origin and content of the trigger
sets. It just sees data packets. Therefore, when
the captured trace data is to be decoded, the
tool needs to know the actual configuration
of the multiplexers and which trigger sets are
selected to be part of the trace data.
Peripherals like CAN, FlexRay, DMA controllers
or GTM, obviously, influence the run-time be-
haviour. The integration of their debug signals
into the trace system – from now on the term
signal trace is used for that – now allows re-
constructing an almost complete system state
by the debug tool and the observation of in-
teractions between CPUs and peripherals. We
have seen that with the new trace sources –
the peripherals – a lot of additional trace data
becomes available. However this data flood is
hardly controllable. The on-chip debug hard-
ware alone does not have the performance to
capture all the data and put them off-chip to
the debug tool. On-chip data are already filtered
to keep the required bandwidth for the trace
to be reasonable. Of course this is also a matter
of analysis efforts. The bigger the information
flood the more difficult it is for the tool, and
in the end for the developer, to identify possible
functional errors or performance bugs. A com-
paratively easy method to configure the multi-
plexers and filter mechanisms of the Aurix on-
chip trigger switch and MCDS is to use the
Universal Emulation Configurator (UEC). UEC
is part of the Universal Debug Engine (UDE)
by PLS, and has been in use for the single-core
Infineon controllers for years and well as for
the new Qorivva MPC57xx family by Freescale.
The flexible concept behind UEC allows a
combination of common program and data
trace with the new signal trace (figure 2). That
way, a trace task can be created completely
with one single tool, without the need to sepa-
rate between on-chip trigger switch and MCDS.
Of course, for trace analysis data from different
trace source have to be merged and displayed
in a combined view. Figure 3 shows an example
of such a combined trace.
Figure 2. Configuration trace
Figure 3. Peripheral trace of the Generic Timer Module (GTM)
