Hardware Emulation for Software Validation (Part 2): Hybrid Emulation and Trace-Based Debug (.PDF Download)

Hardware emulation continues to prove itself as a handy tool for hardware/software co-verification, where the objective is testing the integration of hardware and software. Part 1 of this series looked at how JTAG debug probes let software developers debug software running on a design in the emulator. Part 2 looks at some of the more advanced techniques for running and debugging software in hardware emulation.

The most common way for developers to debug software in emulation is to use a JTAG probe (Fig. 1). While this is a capable debug environment, it’s not likely to be used to start software development earlier. Even with the benefits of virtualizing the JTAG connection described in Part 1 of this series, it’s too slow and expensive to be used as a practical development environment for most software developers.