Highlights | Schedule | Exhibitor List

Judd Heape, Director, Embedded Systems and Applications, QuickLogic
Neal Stollon, System Engineer, First Silicon Solutions

Using an example SoC device, this paper examines the use of embedded instrumentation to resolve problems and optimize overall system performance. The example device contains a MIPS CPU, a variety of on-chip peripherals, and programmable fabric (FPGA logic), all interfacing together via an embedded AMBA bus. Instantiated in the programmable fabric is a hardware implementation of the advanced encryption standard (AES) algorithm. This paper discusses how the instrumentation blocks are utilized to observe the chip's embedded operations, provide real time trace of key signals in the MIPS architecture, and enable analysis of the bus interfaces between the different functional blocks.