A Rule-based Methodology for Hardware Configuration Validation in Embedded Systems

Abstract

As the complexity of multicore SoCs increases, more potential system issues are arising. Hardware-related configuration issues are becoming more complicated owing to the introduction of more cores and various complex peripherals. Considering the complexity of multicore programming, consultation of the main source of guidance, i.e. the user manual, is not an efficient approach to identify such problems. Improper hardware-related configurations could lead to either functional or performance issues. Some of these issues are even subtle and hard to detect. Therefore, a rule-based validation methodology is proposed to deal with hardware-related configuration issues in an efficient and reliable way. Hardware trace is applied in this methodology to detect issues even before symptoms appear. The method directly observes the register accesses and detects bugs based on trace data. It is independent of the application as long as they are run on the given platform, which means the same method implementation could be applied to any applications on the same platform. In this paper, an initial proof-of-concept for the proposed methodology has been implemented and demonstrated on the Infineon TC29 device.