On-Chip Instrumentation

This book provides an in-depth overview of on chip instrumentation technologies and various approaches taken in adding instrumentation to System on Chip (ASIC, ASSP, FPGA, etc.) design that are collectively becoming known as Design for Debug (DfD). On chip instruments are hardware based blocks that are added to a design for the specific purpose and improving the visibility of internal or embedded portions of the design (specific instruction flow in a processor, bus transaction in an on chip bus as examples) to improve the analysis or optimization capabilities for a SoC. DfD is the methodology and infrastructure that surrounds the instrumentation. Coverage includes specific design examples and discussion of implementations and DfD tradeoffs in a decision to design or select instrumentation or SoC that include instrumentation. Although the focus will be on hardware implementations, software and tools will be discussed in some detail. von Stollon, Neal