Real-Time Trace and Analysis

MDK-ARM, together with a ULINK adapter, uses the ARM CoreSight technology in Cortex-M based devices to provide advanced real-time debug, trace, and analysis capabilities.

Data and Event Trace

All Cortex-M3 and Cortex-M4 devices provide data and event trace. MDK-ARM provides a number of ways to analyze this information while your system is running:

• Trace Window - Displays program flow by capturing timestamps, PC samples, exceptions, and Read/Write accesses.
• Debug Viewer - Displays the printf-style output of the Instrumented Trace (ITM) in a terminal window.
• Exceptions window - Displays statistical information about program exceptions and interrupts.
• Event Counters - Display real-time values of specific event counters providing performance indications.
• Logic Analyzer - Graphically displays variable changes in captured data trace.
• RTX Event Viewer - display RTX Kernel task switching events and statistics on a time scale.

Data and Event Trace Windows provide information from the running target for program data, exceptions, variables, and printf-style outputs

Instruction Trace

Cortex-M devices with ETM provide instruction trace. The Keil ULINKpro streams instruction trace directly to your PC, enabling debugging of historical sequences, execution profiling, performance optimization, and code coverage analysis.