Lauterbach, a manufacturer of microprocessor development tools, has announced a new feature of its TRACE32 tools – the ability to export Task Event Based Trace Data for External Timing Analysis.
Lauterbach’s TRACE32 trace tools provide fast and efficient trouble shooting capabilities to detect complex errors that only occur during run-time conditions. With the latest Trace32 technology, the recorded program/data flow is time stamped to allow an overall analysis of the system performance, as well as quality assurance features such as code coverage, cache analysis and timing analysis.
“Timing is essential to the success of real-time embedded system development,” said Barry Lock, UK Manager of Lauterbach. “This new feature of our TRACE32 tools supports the requirements of quality standards by providing proof of timing and code performance.This is done by extracting the real time task event based trace data from the program flow. This data is recorded in the TRACE32 hardware as part of the hardware based trace flow, for example via NEXUS or ETM.”
The extracted data contains task event information and time information and can be saved and exported in CSV format, which can then be used by any external timing analysis and verification tool that supports this file format. It is then possible to analyse the timing data to perform worst-case analysis, peak loading and many other parameters to help with optimising the design. This feature was developed for AUTOSAR but can be applied to many other environments.
“Software reliability is not only a critical commercial issue, but very often a safety issue also,” said Barry Lock. “The ability to export task event based trace data for external timing analysis is an important advance. This new technology within the TRACE32 debug tools will greatly assist engineers worldwide in the development of reliable high performance embedded systems.”
German based Lauterbach is recognised for both engineering excellence and exceptional technical support and its tools have become a favourite with many hi-tech engineers. Lauterbach tools support all the major families of embedded processor cores, covering products from 75 silicon companies. The quality and capability of these tools enable engineering teams to develop robust code whilst minimising development time lost to debugging.
