Tek, Wind River Integrate Tools

Electronic News, April 23, 2001 by Jeff Chappell

Debug software incorporated with logic analyzers

The industry continues to knock chinks into the wall that stands between chip and system designers and the people that build the boxes to test those chips and systems.

The latest blow comes from Beaverton, Ore., and Alameda, Calif., with the partnership of Tektronix Inc. and Wind River Systems Inc., which Tektronix announced at the Embedded Systems Conference in San Francisco earlier this month.

Embedded software maker Wind River (nasdaq: WIND) and Tektronix (nyse: TEK), the grand dame of Oregon's Silicon Forest, said they are integrating Tektronix's TLA Series logic analyzers with Wind River's visionICE and visionPROBE on-chip debug software.

While partnerships such as the one between Tektronix and Wind River are becoming more common, they have yet to become widespread, said Colin Shepard, general manager for logic analyzer products at Tektronix. Nevertheless, the need for such relationships continues to grow.

As semiconductors and the systems they go into become more complex in today's consumer-product-driven industry, the software involved is becoming more complex as well, providing functionality in products such as cell phones and PDAs.

"The software is doing a lot more stuff, but you still need the hardware to do it," Shepard remarked. And it all has to be debugged and made to work together.

However, as is true in other parts of the industry, software engineers don't want to mess with hardware, and the hardware engineers don't want to play with the software. Yet they have to work together in order to get products out the door, Shepard noted.

"Today, up until recently, (software engineers) still had to sit down with the hardware guy and get help," he observed, and they still need a logic analyzer to see what's going on inside their product's systems. According to Wind River, a recent market study showed that more than 50 percent of embedded developers had used a logic analyzer in the last year and 42 percent of those developers used a Tektronix logic analyzer.

In order to allow software engineers to see the data from a logic analyzer in an environment they are familiar with, Wind River has incorporated its software with Tektronix's TLA600 and TLA700 series logic analyzers and a Wind River graphical user interface (GUI).

"The real-time nature of embedded systems requires the visibility offered by logic analyzers," Peter Dawson, vice president and general manager of Wind River's hardware and software integration business unit, said in a statement. "The challenge, though, has been presenting the data acquired by the analyzer in a format familiar to software engineers," he added.

The integrated Wind River/Tektronix tool allows engineers to capture real-time signal traces displayed with the GUI. Developers can use visionICE and visionPROBE software to control the Tektronix logic analyzer as well as the target system being tested. All of the analyzer data, such as signal timing, is displayed within the GUI.

Powerful cross-triggering between visionICE and visionPROBE and the Tektronix logic analyzer can trace up to a breakpoint or stop the target when a real-time eventis captured, according to Wind River. Once engineers acquire real-time trace data, they can use Wind River software to test and debug the application with hardware diagnostics and software tests.

WindRiver's GUI can also display a trace in raw machine code, source code or mixed mode, displaying both machine and source, Wind River said. Users can also search for specific function execution, variable access, specific code addresses or data values. The GUI can filter trace data to select which function to display and supports multiple trace acquisition.

The integrated tool is currently in beta testing; Wind River expects to have the final product available this summer.