Design and Implementation of Reusable On-chip Debug Functions for Micro-processor

In this paper,a reusable on-chip debug method for mirco-processors is proposed in order to facilitate software and application system developing and debugging.By employing a debug instruction set,adding a debug module and extending the functions of the processor,the following functions are implemented: setting and cancelling breakpoints;precisely run-time control of the pipeline-stage in the core;accessing the core resources;collecting the statistic of special events between any procedures of a program,etc.This method has been implemented on the independently designed SuperV_EF01 DSP.The synthesize results under CMOS 90nm process show that the chip area overhead of SuperV_EF01 DSP with the new on-chip debug features is 3.87%,and the critical path timing is not affected.