Reusing and Retargeting On-Chip Instrument Access Procedures in IEEE P1687

Modern chips may contain a large number of embedded test, debugging, configuration, and monitoring features, called instruments. An instrument and its instrument access procedures may be pre-developed and reused, and each instrument—in different chips and through the life-time of a chip—may be accessed in different ways, which requires retargeting. To address reuse and retargeting of instrument access procedures, IEEE P1678 specifies a hardware architecture, a hardware description language, and an access procedure description language. In this paper, we investigate how P1687 facilitates instrument access procedure reuse and retargeting