A generic real-time debugger architecture

For the development of embedded real-time systems the use of conventional debugging tools is inhibited by their intrusiveness in the temporal domain. In this paper we describe a concept for a hardware debugger that excels from standard debuggers in two respects: First, - although providing powerful capabilities for breakpoints and single-stepping - the proposed debugger is non-intrusive with respect to program code and execution time. Second it is flexible enough to be adapted to virtually every target processor. Moreover the break conditions and the set of signals to be traced or controlled can be easily adapted for different purposes. To demonstrate the practical value of our architectural concept we apply it to an actual implementation example and discuss the experiences.