An On-Chip AHB Bus Tracer for Non-intrusive Debugging

As the physical gate-count in System-On-Chip (SoC) increases and system design complexity grows steadily, it becomes more and more difficult to achieve non-intrusive and real-time debugging. Since the on-chip bus is an important SoC infrastructure that connects major hardware components, we design an AHB bus tracer to achieve non-intrusive debugging and performance analysis of the SoC. In this paper, we first research the interconnection structure and data transmission principle of AMBA AHB, and propose a bus tracing approach which can monitor the data transmission between all master and slave devices of AHB. Then we explore a data packing approach to avoid the confusion of tracing and a configurable circular trace memory to implement the on-chip caching. As a case study, we implement an AHB interconnect system for simulation verification, and the experimental results show that the bus tracer we designed can trace all information for different types of AHB transmission accurately.