Event-driven framework for configurable runtime system observability for SOC designs

Abstract

The deep integration of software and hardware components within complex system-on-chip (SOC) designs prevents the use of traditional analysis and debug methods to observe the internal state of these components. This situation is further exacerbated for in-situ debugging, verification, and certification efforts in which physical access to traditional debug and trace interfaces is unavailable, infeasible, or cost prohibitive. In this paper, we present an overview of an event-driven system-level observation framework that provides low-overhead methods for observing and analyzing designer specified hardware and software events at runtime.