Hardware debugging method based on signal transitions and transactions

  • Authors:
  • Nobuyuki Ohba;Kohji Takano

  • Affiliations:
  • IBM Japan Ltd., Yamato city, Kanagawa, Japan;IBM Japan Ltd., Yamato city, Kanagawa, Japan

  • Venue:
  • ASP-DAC '06 Proceedings of the 2006 Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

This paper proposes a hardware design debugging method, Transition and Transaction Tracer (TTT), which probes and records the signals of interest for a long time, hours, days, or even weeks, without a break. It compresses the captured data in real time and stores it in a state transition format in memory. It can be programmed to generate a trigger for a logic analyzer when it detects certain transitions. The visualizer, which shows the captured data in the matrix, timing-chart, and state-transition diagram formats, helps the engineer effectively find bugs.