ICEBERG: an embedded in-circuit emulator synthesizer for microcontrollers

This paper presents a synthesis tool ICEBERG for embedded in-circuit emulators (ICE's), that are part of the development environment for microcontroller (or microprocessor)-based systems (PIPER-II). The tool inserts and integrates the necessary in-circuit emulation circuitry into a given RTL core of a microcontroller, and thus turning the core into an embedded ICE. The ICE, based on the IEEE 1149.1 JTAG architecture, provides standard debugging mechanisms, including boundary scan paths, partial scan paths, single stepping, internal resource monitoring and modification, breakpoint detection, and mode switching between debugging and free running modes. ICEBERG has been successfully applied to synthesize the embedded ICE for an industrial microcontroller HT48100 from its RTL core.