Most software engineers spend a significant amount of time debugging and optimizing their applications. Traditional Emulators and Simulation debugging tools uncover the majority of application bugs , but the really hard to find intermittent issues sometimes evade developers for days, weeks and sometimes they're never found. In real time systems, traditional stop mode debugging techniques change the state of the system making these bugs virtually "invisible". Performance measurements in a real-time environment are difficult, and often do not provide the granularity needed to properly identify performance issues in the application. The Blackhawk XDS560 Trace product includes both the BH XDS560 USB high speed emulator and a TI enabled trace unit. This trace system enables developers to find bugs that traditional debugging methods cannot. XDS560 Trace is solving the toughest real time problems.

Trace can detect the really hard to find bugs race conditions between events, intermittent real time glitches, crashes from stack overflows, runaway code and false interrupts without stopping the processor. The XDS560 Trace is well-suited for identifying and resolving these types of bugs, by employing a circular buffer to build a history of application execution with non-intrusive real-time data capture. Integrated cycle-accurate timestamping enables developers to correlate time values to the processor's Program Counter and step backwards through time to reconstruct errors. The ability to collect data read and write addresses and values provides unprecedented visibility into the applications operation. Using the non-intrusive cycle accurate timestamping with program counter addresses enables developers to quickly identify performance bottlenecks in their application such as cache effects, cross-path stalls, and resource contention.

Trace is a completely non-intrusive debug method that relies on a debug unit inside the DSP so it does not interfere or change the application’s real time behavior. Fine tune code performance and cache optimization of complex switch intensive multi-channel applications. Trace enables real-time code and event profiling as well as fast and accurate code analysis with profiling, cache view and code coverage for some of the most popular C6000 catalog devices today used in applications such as video teleconferencing and medical imaging. Trace is supported on 17 catalog devices currently (DM64x, C641x and C645x device families). Specialized watchpoints based on hardware-based state machines enable complex, real-time Advanced Event Triggers to start and stop data capture. Trace non-intrusively extends full, real-time visibility of registers and counters, requires no special drivers, and is fully supported by TI's Code Composer Studio™ Integrated Development Environment.

• A single, independently clocked input channel
• Independently de-skew data pins on channel initialization
• Up to 167 MHz dual edge data rate

The XDS560 Trace is designed for use with trace-enabled DSP processors. Currently the following processors are fully supported by trace: TMS320C6454, TMS320C6455, TMS320C6418, TMS320C6416T, TMS320C6416, TMS320C6415T, TMS320C6415, TMS320C6414T, TMS320C6414, TMS320C6413, TMS320C6412, TMS320C6411, TMS320C6410, TMS320DM643, TMS320DM642, TMS320DM641, TMS320DM640. The XDS560 Trace utilizes a high-density header 60-pin connector, as well as compression technology, to increase the effective bandwidth available for capturing real-time data values. While requiring approximately the same board space as a standard JTAG connector and providing full JTAG capabilities, the HD connector is also capable of interfacing directly to the integrated trace unit on many of TI's DSPs and digital media processors. Please refer to SPRU655 for board layout considerations. The 60-pin high density connector is shipping today on DM642 EVM, C6455 EVM and the C6416T DSK.