#Arm emulator company software#
#Arm emulator company simulator#

The piece of code added to the software is called a gdb stub. On a silicon target where a chip is placed on a board, the only way to communicate with gdb to send and receive the protocol information is by adding some special software to the user's software running on the embedded processor that will communicate with gdb to send information such as the register contents and memory contents. In fact, gdb provides an interface and specification called the remote protocol interface that implements a communication channel between the debugger and the target CPU to implement the necessary functionality to enable gdb to debug a program. To communicate with a target CPU gdb requires the target to perform the following functions:ДҐ) Retrieve the current status of the program (stopped, exited, and so forth) This can best be seen in a summary of the GNU debugger (gdb) remote protocol requirements.

To debug software programs, a software debugger requires only a few primitive operations to control execution of a microprocessor. To perform co-verification with an RTL model of the microprocessor, a software debugger must be able to communicate with the CPU RTL. With a hardware execution engine that runs a few hundred kHz up to 1 MHz it is possible to interactively debug software running on the RTL model of the CPU. The primary area where this technique has seen success is with simulation acceleration and emulation systems that are capable of running at much higher speeds. After all, a simulation environment for a large SoC typically runs less than 100 cycles/sec and running at this speed it is not possible to use a software debugger to perform interactive debugging. Historically, logic simulation has always been too slow to make the investigation of this technique interesting. Since it is totally inside the hardware execution engine, there is no chance to take any simulation short cuts that are possible (or automatic) with host-code execution or instruction set simulation. The drawback of using the RTL code is that it can only execute as fast as the hardware execution engine it is running on. The reality is that the RTL code can be used for co-verification and has successfully been used by project teams.

#Arm emulator company simulator#

Is a separate model like the instruction set simulator really needed? It does not seem natural to most engineers (especially hardware engineers) to replace the golden RTL of the CPU, the representation of the design that will be implemented in the silicon, with something else. everybody wants to know the best way to perform co-verification. Now that the RTL code for the CPU is available and can easily be run in a logic simulator or emulation system.

Soft macros offer better flexibility and eliminate portability issues in the physical design and fabrication process. most SoC designs don't use hard macros but instead use a soft macro in the form of synthesizable Verilog or VHDL. As an example, most of the ARM7TDMI designs use a hard macro licensed from ARM.

The hard macro also allows the IP to be used without revealing all of the source code of the design. The company creating the IP wanted to make sure the user realized the maximum benefit in terms of optimized performance and area. In the beginning, most IP for critical blocks such as the embedded microprocessor were in the form of hard IP. This section discusses techniques that avoid model creation issues by using a representation of the microprocessor that doesn't depend on an engineer coding a model of its behavior.ДЄs the world of SoC design has evolved, the design flows used for microprocessor and DSP IP have changed. As we have seen in Part 1 and Part 2, there are benefits and drawbacks of using software models of microprocessors and other hardware.