“As the global market leader in debugging and tracing tools, we must demand the highest standards from our development platforms. The AMD Zynq™ UltraScale+™ MPSoC is an outstanding solution for developing leading products that meet the demanding requirements of today’s and tomorrow’s customers in terms of performance, reliability, energy efficiency, and flexibility.“
—— Stephan Lauterbach
Co-owner and Chief Technology Officer
Founded in 1979, Lauterbach has established itself as a market leader in circuit emulators and debugging tools. Today, with over 40 years of experience, Lauterbach’s easy-to-use TRACE32® microprocessor debugging and tracing tools are widely used across multiple industries, from renewable energy to smartphones and automotive.
TRACE32® PowerDebug is a powerful, modular, and flexible debugging system that adapts to customers’ varying projects and chip changes. TRACE32® PowerTrace extends functionality by collecting information while the system is running without interrupting task execution. It can be used for timing analysis, locating hard-to-find bugs that occur only during runtime, or creating code coverage reports for certification.
Project Challenges
Lauterbach’s customers have consistently expected the TRACE32® tools to deliver high performance, functionality, and reliability, as well as support for multicore debugging and various types of operating systems and hypervisors.
Additionally, the tools need to support new chips through flexible upgrades and correlate external signals with program code to perform operations such as energy analysis.
Lauterbach had to integrate all these requirements into its products at both the chip and software levels and explore a high-performance, flexible, and low-power solution that minimizes the number of chips used to maximize reliability.
Solution
After thorough evaluation, Lauterbach selected the AMD Zynq™ UltraScale+™ MPSoC for the design of its PowerDebug module. This device offers exceptional processing, I/O, and memory bandwidth in an optimized heterogeneous processing engine combination (1.3GHz clock frequency for the Arm® Cortex®-A53 CPU, 533MHz clock frequency for the Arm Cortex-R5F real-time CPU), embedded in a high-performance on-chip interconnect alongside a suitable on-chip memory subsystem.
The AMD Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC provides the extensive performance, flexibility, and efficiency that Lauterbach needs to meet the demands of its next-generation TRACE32® debugging and tracing tools, while also offering multiple security levels, enhanced security, and advanced power management features, which are critical requirements for Lauterbach.
Figure 1: TRACE32 Modular System
Lauterbach’s Strategic Technology Alliance Manager Rolf Kühnis stated: “Our customers have debugging tools that have been on the market for 15 years, which involves long maintenance times. These products are very durable and often operate in harsh environments.With the flexible Zynq adaptive SoC from AMD, we can easily upgrade these products in the field.“
Design Outcomes
By using a tracking extension solution powered by the high-performance Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC chip (supported by AMD Kintex™ 7 FPGA), Lauterbach was able to achieve all design goals, including:
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Providing an extremely high level of flexibility: The TRACE32® PowerDebug X50 base module can be configured to support over 15,000 devices, covering more than 150 supported chip architectures, simply by replacing the debugging probe or adding the appropriate license.
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Enhancing the performance of debugging and tracing tools: The powerful implementation capabilities of the PowerDebug module mean that responses during debugging are extremely quick. Lauterbach offloads many tasks to the nearby Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC. Pure software implementations in a PC can lead to longer overall processes due to high latency. The tracking extension achieves a tracking bandwidth of 80Gb/s, provided by the TRACE32® PowerTrace Serial 2.
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Expanding the feature set: Lauterbach offers unlimited multicore debugging, OS and AUTOSAR-aware debugging, hypervisor-aware debugging, remote debugging, and the ability to add logic analyzer modules in real-time to record chip data and hardware signals.
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Power efficiency: Lauterbach’s solution based on the AMD Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC and its advanced dynamic power management unit helps users maintain low power consumption.
Kühnis noted: “AMD is a trusted partner that can provide flexible products at the right time with the right price and packaging solutions. When our customers propose new solutions and need them quickly realized, the flexibility provided by AMD helps us meet these customer needs as soon as possible.”
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