Industry Expert Blogs

In increasingly complex SoC designs, many of which contain multiple cores and multiple modes, determining best practices for testing and debugging is a moving target.

Jason Andrews, architect at Cadence Design Systems, said multicore debug is a huge issue. It isn’t easy to do, and there aren’t many good ways to do it.

He suggested one approach is to try to use virtual platforms as a way to do multicore debug in the context of software running on multiple cores plus whatever the state of hardware system is. “I look at it and try to provide an environment that is a programmer’s view for all the different cores in order to see what’s going on with each core, including the importance to the hardware and the peripherals. The programmers are reading and writing registers and interacting with the hardware behavior. Today there is not an easy way to do that, so even if you have good software debugger it only sees software. It doesn’t really see hardware,” he explained.

Complexity also can be exacerbated based on the type of multicore design, as Frank Schirrmeister, director of product marketing for system-level solutions at Synopsys noted.

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