The CPU’s hardware extensions for advanced emulation features provide simple, inexpensive, and speed independent access to the CPU for sophisticated debugging and economical system development, without requiring the costly cabling and access to processor pins required by traditional emulator systems.
This access is provided without intruding on
system resources. The on-chip development interface provides:
- Minimally intrusive access to internal and
external memory
- Minimally intrusive access to CPU and peripheral
registers
- Control of the execution of code:
- Break on a software
breakpoint instruction (instruction replacement)
- Break on a specified
program or data access without requiring instruction replacement
- Break on external
attention request from debug host or additional hardware
- Break after the execution
of a single instruction (single-stepping)
- Control over the
execution of code from device power up
- Nonintrusive determination of device status:
- Detection of a system
reset, emulation/test-logic reset, or power-down occurrence
- Detection of the absence
of a system clock or memory-ready signal
- Determination of whether
global interrupts are enabled
- Determination of why
debug accesses can be blocked
- A cycle counter for performance benchmarking.