Hard Processor System Technical Reference Manual: Agilex™ 5 SoCs

ID 814346
Date 4/01/2024
Public
Document Table of Contents

15.2.2. CPU Trace using Embedded Trace Macrocell

The Cortex* -A76 and Cortex* -A55 CoreSight* ETM trace units provide a non-intrusive solution to monitor real-time instruction flow based on the Arm* ETMv4 architecture.

The Cortex-A76 and Cortex* -A55 CoreSight* ETM supports:

  • Instruction trace: Shows the core execution history and can be used to search for places where execution might behave unexpectedly
  • Context ID trace
  • Context and address filtering which can be used to limit the amount of trace data generated
  • More complicated logic analyzer style filtering and sequencing
  • Cycle counting
  • Global timestamp

You can use CPU trace to measure code performance. You can use instruction trace along with cycle count information or timestamps to:

  • Profile functional timing (entry to exit)
  • Collect code coverage metrics