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Trace capturing

Hello,

Im in embedded software development, but interested in developing a device which can caputure trace information from a Nexus class-3 compliant processor. Possibly later changed to capture trace from any processor. The trace has to be modfied to be used by data-acquisition application running on a PC (interfaces: USB/Ethernet/Firewire)

I figured out that using an FPGA would be ideal for such a application. But which one ? Any recommendations ? Which processor core to use (Hard/Soft Core -- cost ??) , IP's for I/O and Nexus. etc

Is anyone working on such a concept/project ?

Pointers and hints and welcome!

Kind Regards, Ravishankar

Reply to
Ravishankar S
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Unless you expect to embed this functionality in large numbers of copies of your product, you should instead consider an off-the-shelf logic analyzer from the usual instrumentation suppliers. You will get all the functionality you describe, lots of built-in software and configurability, and a helpdesk to beat-up when things aren't going well.

Many hobbyists make do-it-yourself logic analyzers based on some kind of FPGA+PC combination, but it's labour-intensive stuff. If you need this for your development lab(s), go buy or rent a ready-to-use box. They're not cheap, but it's well-established technology and they work brilliantly.

--
Jonathan Bromley, Consultant

DOULOS - Developing Design Know-how
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Doulos Ltd., 22 Market Place, Ringwood, BH24 1AW, UK
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The contents of this message may contain personal views which 
are not the views of Doulos Ltd., unless specifically stated.
Reply to
Jonathan Bromley

Hi Jonathan,

But this is a processor with no external bus. (Also its for experimentation). So logic analyser as far as I know wont help here. The idea is to build an emulator which can caputure the Nexus public messages and also write into internal memories of the controller for calibration of variables.

Kind Regards, Ravishankar

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Reply to
Ravishankar S

Ravishankar,

Ah. Bad assumption by me. I just (foolishly) assumed that Nexus was yet another regular CPU. Any links I can follow to take a look?

OK, fair enough.

Logic analysers can be persuaded to decode all manner of protocol stuff, but I agree that this sounds a bit too specialised.

Sorry to have misunderstood.

--
Jonathan Bromley, Consultant

DOULOS - Developing Design Know-how
VHDL * Verilog * SystemC * e * Perl * Tcl/Tk * Project Services

Doulos Ltd., 22 Market Place, Ringwood, BH24 1AW, UK
jonathan.bromley@MYCOMPANY.com
http://www.MYCOMPANY.com

The contents of this message may contain personal views which 
are not the views of Doulos Ltd., unless specifically stated.
Reply to
Jonathan Bromley

Hi Jonathan,

Nexus is a OnChip mechanism which works in conjunction with the debug port (JTAG). So the debug port controls the device and sets up triggers , the AUX port send out the trace information and takes in trace data. More at the Nexus site: can find through google. One similarity to logic analzysis is the capturing happens synchronous to the clock: in case of LA its memory clock and Nexus its a special nexus output clock. The data though in case of Nexus is variable length and is compressed.

Kind Regards, Ravishankar

an

Reply to
Ravishankar S

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