An On-Chip AHB Bus Tracer With Real-Time Compression and Dynamic Multiresolution Supports for SoC

Abstract—This paper proposes a multiresolution AHB on-chip bus tracer named SYS-HMRBT (aHb multiresolution bus tracer) for versatile system-on-chip (SoC) debugging and monitoring. The bus tracer is capable of capturing the bus trace with different resolutions, all with efficient built-in compression mechanisms, to meet a diverse range of needs. In addition, it allows users to switch the trace resolution dynamically so that appropriate resolution levels can be applied to different segments of the trace. On the other hand, SYS-HMRBT supports tracing after/before an event triggering, named post-triggering trace/pre-triggering trace, respectively. SYS-HMRBT runs at 500 MHz and costs 42 K gates in TSMC 0.13- m technology, indicating that it is capable of real time tracing and is very small in modern SoCs. Experiments show that the bus tracer achieves very good compression ratios of 79%–96%, depending on the selected resolution mode. As a case study, it has been integrated into a 3-D graphics SoC to facilitate the debugging and monitoring of the system behaviors. The SoC has been successfully verified both in field-programmable gate array and a test chip. Index Terms—AHB, AMBA, compression, multiresolution, periodical triggering, post-T trace, pre-T trace, real time trace, system-on-chip (SoC) debugging. I