PERFORMANCE BOOST OF LAUTERBACH’S POWER TRACE SERIAL

Power Trace Serial streaming performance more than doubles

 

 

Lauterbach is pleased to announce another significant milestone in the performance of their PowerTrace Serial family of trace tools. One of the features of the Lauterbach trace tools is the ability to stream the captured trace data to the host filesystem, using the traditional trace buffer memory as an extended FIFO. This frees developers to capture trace for extended periods of time. Trace data is very ‘bursty’ in nature and even gigabyte FIFOs can overflow under extreme load and this is usually where the interesting interactions in an application are. Removing this important bottleneck can increase the quality of the recorded trace data.

By adjusting the transfer protocol between the PowerTrace Serial and the PowerDebug Pro units, an increase in throughput of over 220% has been achieved. Several small changes in the FPGA programs in both devices have accumulated to yield a massive performance boost which can significantly reduce the likelihood of buffer overflows during peak trace streaming. The new system delivers a whopping 400 MBytes/second to the host filesystem if USB3 is used.

According to Norbert Weiss, Managing Director of Lauterbach GmbH: “Our engineers are continually striving to improve every aspect of our tools to ensure we have world leading tools ready for when our customers need them. This dramatic improvement will help engineers developing complex multi-core systems, those who need to analyze their application for extended periods of time, or those who need to certify their system to an international standard. Small measures like this re-affirm Lauterbach’s commitment to remain the dominant force in debug tools.”

The new units will start shipping towards the end of 2020 and existing customers will be able to update their firmware and USB driver from the next release of the TRACE32 PowerView software 09/2020.