Nexus Class 3 Trace support

Hard real-time debugging requires close interaction with the processor. Tracing shall provide a chronological picture of a system inner working up to, starting from or in the vicinity an event, mainly to guide a human in understanding a faulty program. Nexus was defined for this purpose and is available on the Power Architecture derivatives.

The Nexus Class 3 Trace of Power Architecture derivatives is used to capture processor states in real-time using a dedicated connection to the derivative.

Nexus Class 3 Trace

The Universal Debug Engine supports with the UAD3+ the Nexus trace up to 32 bit trace port and up to 500 MHz system clock. The Nexus Class 3 Mictor connector is supported.

Feature summary:

Trace memory extendable up to 4 GBytes
Time-endless tracefor a continuous tracing and observation
Trace up to 32 bit wide, Half Rate clock mode up to 250 MHz
Wide range for I/O voltage on the target hardware, 0.8V - 3.3 Volts
Intelligent trace filter for optimal trace utilization, Automatic edge detection
Variable time stamps possible, inserted by the trace board frontend, time stamp resolution 1/ f TRACE (i.e. 5ns at f TRACE =200MHz)
Separate trace podis connected to the UAD3+ by a Gigabit serial multi-lane cable length up to 5 meters long (0.5m, 1m - default, 2m and 5m)
External Trigger Pins.

By compiling the trace data directly via the trace hardware this sample rate complies with a multitude of machine code instructions. Recording is synchronous to the system clock frequency. This ensures the optimal use of the trace memory and allows application specific time stamps. Start and stop of recording is comfortably controlled via triggers. The total performance of the Nexus unit is available for trigger events. The comfortable trace window included in the user interface offers a direct link to the user from trace samples to the related source code, monitoring the runtime of the program based on the time stamps and comprehensive search functions.