AN 802: Intel® Stratix® 10 SoC Device Design Guidelines

ID 683117
Date 8/05/2021
Public
Document Table of Contents

5.9.3. Selecting Software Trace Tools

Tracing can be very helpful for profiling performance bottlenecks, debugging crash scenarios and debugging complex cases. Tracing can be performed in two ways:

  • Non-real-time: by storing trace data in system memory (for example, SDRAM) or the embedded trace buffer, then stopping the system, downloading the trace information through JTAG, and analyzing it.
  • Real-time: by using an external adapter to capture trace data from the trace port. The target board needs to support this scenario.

Typically, the debug tools also offer tracing of the embedded software program execution, but external hardware may be required. For example, the Arm* DS-5* for Intel® SoC FPGA Edition provided with the SoC EDS supports both non-real-time and real-time tracing. When used for real-time tracing, an additional external trace unit called Arm* DSTREAM is required.

Lauterbach* T32 also requires external hardware for real-time tracing.