A Real-Time Two-Level Trace Compressor for FPGA-Based SoC On-Chip Debugger

We have presented a two-level trace compressor design with pipeline structure for real-time FPGA- based SoC on-chip debugger. A counter-based coarse level compressor is designed to cope with continuously repeating tracer data sequences, and the following fine level compressor is used to further compress the similarity bits between two neighbor trace of the de- repeated tracer data sequence. The two-level trace compressor not only is synchronous with the tracer sampling clock rate, but also consume less synthesized chip area. The compression ratio of such a trace compressor is very high up to 100 times dependent of the tracer data channel arrangement. By the parametric hardware-description language module design, we can reconfigure flexible tracer data channel and data storage structure in order to match with different system requirements