Net Work Based SoC Trace System And Architecture Study

With the continuous development of integrated circuit and design technology,the integration of transistors and complexity of design on a chip is getting higher and higher.Nowadays an entire system is able to be implemented on a signal chip,known as system-on-chip(SoC).The development of SoC devices is based on the design reuse philosophy,i.e.,they are created by combining processors,pre-designed IP cores,infrastructure IPs,memory,and user-defined logic units.Compared with the previous PCB-based design approach,SoC has significant advantages in terms of performance,power consumption and area,which makes it widely used in mobile devices,consumer electronics and communication network equipment.However,the more complex the design is,the more difficult it is to find all bugs before the first tape out,although the current universal verification methodology(UVM)has made great progress.When hardware or software errors are found,the debugging process is triggered to find out the root cause and to make a bug-free.Debug and trace system is the hardware unit in SoC to achieve this function.The current debugging and tracking system mainly uses the centralized idea,that is,all signals from tracking source are connected to the debugging and tracking system,and then through the arbitration algorithm to determine the output at a certain moment.With the increasing complexity of SoC,the centralized arbitration architecture can't meet the requirement of debugging and tracking system for large data volume and multi-core parallel debugging.In this paper,two kinds of debugging and tracking systems with different architecture are introduced,and the comparative analysis is carried out.First,we analyze the requirement of SoC for debugging and tracking,and then analyze the arbitration tracking system,including the data flow,packet format,internal module design and global timestamp,and run simulation in the OVM verification environment.Then an on-chip debugging and tracking system based on network architecture is introduced,and its overall topology,data flow,input/output interface protocol,internal network interface and global timestamp are analyzed.Finally,we make a comprehensive comparative analysis about the two debugging and tracking systems from the overall structure,the construction of the verification platform and the out bandwidth and the area.Compared with the centraliaed system,the on-chip debug tracking system based on network architecture not only can track data accurately and quickly,but also has obvious advantages in performance,area,scalability and reusability,so it's more in line with the requirements of complex SoC for debugging and tracking system.