A New Real-Time Address Tracer for Embedded Microprocessors Based on Preprocessing

A real-time address tracer is a kernel of a dynamic debugging system for any embedded system such as the ARM7TDMI. In our previous version, we have provided an effective compression method, which usually uses only 8 to 32 entries (32 bits each entry) of table, a simple counter and low cost hardware instead of using 0.5k to 4k entries of dictionary and window based on LZW-based compression methods. This new version adds a pre-processing and its corresponding post-procession steps such that the needed tracing memories can be further greatly decreased by shifting the on-line work loading to the pre-processing and post-processing. Comparing with other work on cost and compression ratio for several benchmarks, the average results of our system are also better than others.