High Throughput Hardware Accelerated CoreSight Trace Decoding

A single tracing component embedded into a high-frequency processor may produce up to 1 GB/s of trace data or more. These data are vital in debugging, monitoring, verification, and performance analysis in System-on-chip and heterogeneous system development. Hardware trace decoders and analyzers have emerged to support online processing of trace data for real-time applications. However, the existing hardware trace decoders designed for the Embedded Trace Macrocell version 4 (ETMv4), a standard feature in most modern ARM processors, can only process trace data at a maximum rate of 250 MB/s. This paper proposes an optimized and parallelized trace decoder for the ETMv4 specification implemented on a Xilinx Ultrascale+ processing up to 1 GB/s of trace data from a single ETM.