Extended hardware verification using software test cases increases design confidence by exercising those hardware designs with real-world software test cases.
In the video above, Sourcery CodeBench Virtual Edition is used in conjunction with a Veloce emulator and a custom ARM Cortex-M3 hardware design to develop and debug a bare metal application which takes advantage of a custom hardware accelerator. Sourcery CodeBench’s Virtual Probe feature is used to load and debug the bare metal application on the Veloce emulator.
Debugging techniques include setting breakpoints and using Veloce triggers to explore both the software and hardware system.
Veloce waveforms are used to show relevant hardware signals and events. We examine the application code’s function call stack, as well as the HDL for the hardware accelerator. A Veloce trigger is used to stop execution when an error condition occurs and allows us to locate and fix the bug.