Improve your debugging process with quality PCB Design
Due to continuously increasing demands of today’s embedded software, semiconductors are designing MCUs with enormous complexity. But, it is all in vain, if the quality of the PCB design of the target board doesn’t allow to tap into MCU’s full capabilities during development and test.
Low PCB design quality = poor tracing experience
One of the most powerful and effective debug techniques in embedded development and test is HW based tracing. Tracing means recording microcontroller activity, such as Program or Data flow. A microcontroller can produce as much as 1 GB of trace data per second. To record this much data you need an infrastructure that supports it.
Possible issues
Non-optimal target PCB design and other hardware components can degrade electrical signals. While transferring trace data at high-frequencies from target microcontroller to iSYSTEM BlueBox, signal integrity issues can be a challenging problem.
In such case, iSYSTEM winIDEA IDE can report error messages such as:
- Cannot connect to the CPU Debug Unit. Possible signal integrity issue.
- Debug communication error.
- Error. Please perform the Trace port calibration.
Even though the BlueBox is fully capable of capturing all trace data.
How to avoid such issues?
Read our new technical note PCB Design Guidelines about:
- Recommended guidelines when designing your target board
- Auto calibration feature
- High frequency trace signals
- Signal integrity issues and how to address them
Need more information?
Send us an email to request@isystem.com.