A model-driven automatically-retargetable debug tool for embedded systems

Contemporary SoC designs ask for system-level debugging tools suitable to heterogeneous platforms. Such tools will have to rely on some low-level model-driven debugging engine that must be retargetable, since embedded code may run on distinct processors within the same platform. This paper describes a technique for automatically retargeting debugging tools for embedded code inspection. The technique relies on two key ideas: automatic extraction of machine-dependent information from a formal model of the processor and reuse of a conventional binary utility package as implementation infrastructure. The retargetability of the technique was experimentally validated for targets MIPS, SPARC, PowerPC and i8051.