Hardware Observability Framework for Minimally Intrusive Online Monitoring of Embedded Systems

Abstract

As the complexity of digital systems rapidly increases, designers are presented with significant challenges in monitoring, analyzing, and debugging the complex interactions of various software and hardware components. Existing hardware tests and debugging methods are often intrusive, either requiring significant hardware resources or requiring the execution of the system to be halted thus leading to system perturbations that can change the execution behavior to an extent that the erroneous behavior can no longer be observed -- or lead to system failure due to missed execution deadlines. In this paper, we present an initial framework for minimally intrusive hardware observability that provides designers with the ability to monitor complex application-specific hardware execution behavior at runtime with zero -- or minimal -- impact on system execution.