APPARATUS AND METHOD FOR IMPROVING EMULATION SPEED OF HIGH-LEVEL LANGUAGES IN ON-CHIP EMULATION SYSTEMS

摘要

Methods and apparatus for stepping-over and stepping-out of functions encountered during program execution on a target processor (120) during debug operations are implemented within a combination of an emulator (125) and a debug module (140). By having communication and storage devices (230, 235, 240, 255, 257, 260) available on-chip in the debug module, stepping and address compare details are conducted local to the processor at hardware speeds. The methods correctly determine necessary algorithmic steps to accommodate recursive and nested function calls without intervention by a combination of a host debug platform and a debug software application. This avoids the amount of time that would otherwise be necessary to cycle communications to ,the debug host level to accomplish the same processes. Override instructions (255) for the target processor can be inserted and alternate memory locations jumped to under control (245) of the same debug module, thereby using hardware resources efficiently.