Minimising the impact of software instrumentation using on-chip debug and a secondary CPU Core

As SoC and general purpose controllers become more complex and more tightly integrated, gaining access to the runtime data required for software verification and debug has become more challenging. This means software engineers are now more reliant than ever upon software instrumentation and the on-chip mechanisms provided to extract this vital information. In this paper the author proposes using on-chip debug hardware coupled with a secondary CPU core to extract instrumentation data. Using a secondary core alleviates the need to modify the source code on the primary CPU and therefore avoids many of the difficulties with modifying code and minimises the impact of the software instrumentation.