Tool-set for NoC-based MPSoC debugging — A protocol view perspective

Software development becomes an important issue in today´s MPSoC design. Due to the inherent non-deterministic behavior of MPSoCs, they are prone to concurrency bugs. Debugging tools for MPSoC may be grouped in the following classes: simulators, parallel software development environments, NoC debuggers. An important gap is observed concerning a complete NoC-based MPSoC: tools to inspect the traffic exchanged between processing elements in a higher abstraction level, and not simply as raw data. This is the goal of the paper: propose a new class of debugging tools, able to trace the messages exchanged between PEs, enabling debugging at the protocol level. Examples of protocols include communication between tasks, mapping heuristics, monitoring schemes for QoS, among others. The paper presents the proposed debug framework, as well as a task migration protocol as case study.