Trace Extensions
Get Full Insights of Your Embedded System
Trace based debugging adds a powerful set of features to complement and enhance your existing debug tools. Many modern devices include a trace port which is capable of providing real-time, non-intrusive information about program flow and data operations. This can be used to work out where code has been, how long things took, to analyze task switches, interrupts, and to generate code coverage reports. If you think of traditional debugging as a series of snapshots, then trace-based debugging is a video with timestamps.
All TRACE32® trace tools also include an option for logic trace: digital, analogue, or mixed-signal. This enables the cross-triggering of software and hardware events, traditional logic and protocol analysis, and power consumption measurements, all from within your favorite debug environment.
Why real-time tracing?
Program flow trace shows you exactly which instructions have been executed and how long it took to execute them. By using real-time tracing you can:
- easily create code coverage reports from this data,
- quickly locate timing bottlenecks in your code or prove that it meets any required deadlines,
- capture a complete picture of those hard-to-find bugs that only occur infrequently at run-time.
All of this without interfering with the application being tested.
