by Rick Leatherman, MIPS TECHNOLOGIES
As multicore designs proliferate, one of the biggest challenges for developers is gaining nonintrusive visibility into the processor cores and their interactions. Furthermore, access to intelligent peripherals is important to successfully debug system-level issues for these highly integrated chips.
Adding multicore-specific On-Chip Instrumentation (OCI®) into the silicon can offer advantages that can help developers meet System-on-Chip (SoC) debugging challenges. Whether developers are bringing up hardware, porting an operating system, writing middleware, debugging application code, or trying to optimize system-level performance, multicore OCI can provide a “hardware assist” to shorten the design cycle.
