EMULATION FUNDAMENTALS FOR TI'S DSP SOLUTIONS

Texas Instruments' debuggers allow extensive visibility into the processors, their registers, and the application's software. This visibility allows the software engineer to understand what changes are taking place inside of the processor as the application executes. The software engineer can set breakpoints in the application based on hardware signal values or software locations within the application. At these breakpoints, the user can understand the state of the processor and data and determine if their application is still operating correctly. They can also perform benchmarking(timing analysis) and profiling(CPU loading) of their application software within the emulator.

Additionally, multi-processor debug can allow the user to debug software on several processors at the same time and provide a method of stopping one or multiple processors based on a condition set in another processor - allowing the user to capture the entire system state at the time in question.

The capabilities mentioned, and many more within the Texas Instruments debuggers can greatly reduce debugging time in the software development cycle.

This paper will explain the fundamentals of how the emulation logic and emulation tools work together with the TI Digital Signal Processors. By understanding the fundamentals of emulation, you will be able to accelerate the process of setting up and performing software debug. This knowledge will also aid in trouble shooting potential problems in your debugging setup.

This paper will explain the setup of the XDS510 systems for single and multi-processor applications. It will also explain how the system components interact during debug. A trouble-shooting guide will be provided to assist in commonly found set-up problems.

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