12:10 - 12:45  Paper 4

Real-time trace reconstruction on the fly

Jonathan Hector, UK Manager, iSystem Ltd

'Realtime Trace Reconstruction' is a completely new technology introduced by iSYSTEM. On-chip interfaces such as Nexus or ETM only provide highly compressed data. Usually this data is saved in the trace buffer, and analyzed off-line once the buffer is filled. The software analysis includes a reconstruction of the program flow which can take a while depending on the buffer size. The functionality is further limited for execution profiling and execution coverage. Only the information that is recorded in the buffer can be analyzed, which, depending on the trace buffer size, can cover a few milliseconds up to a couple of seconds, but this is still far short of the hours or even days required to fully stress test an application. iSYSTEM has developed a new solution for this dilemma, and this presentation will show how our iTRACE PRO is now able to do a real-time trace reconstruction on the fly, meaning the engineer can get all the emulation and trace possibilities which are familiar from real in-circuit emulators - but only using the NEXUS/ETM connection.