Debugging Modern SoCs With Embedded Analytics: Instrumentation, Trace, And Faster Root-Cause Isolation

As SoCs chase ever higher performance and power efficiency, their designs have become harder to rootcause and harder to debug. Today’s devices combine billions of transistors with heterogeneous compute blocks and a growing mix of third‑party IPs, so failures can come from anywhere: a corner-case interaction between cores, an integration mistake, a timing assumption that no longer holds, or a manufacturing anomaly that only shows up under specific conditions. The practical result is that debug and trace often set the pace of the schedule. Teams must sift through large volumes of on-chip data and narrow down problems that may reproduce only intermittently, which makes high-quality observability—and efficient ways to turn signals into answers—essential for silicon bring-up and long-term reliability.

To address these issues, Siemens EDA Tessent Embedded Analytics provides an on-chip instrumentation and host-side software framework intended to shorten the path from first silicon to actionable debug data. The goal is to make internal SoC activity observable with lower manual effort—during lab validation and, where enabled, in deployed systems—so teams can move from symptoms to root cause with fewer ad hoc experiments and iterations.

Debug workflow integration: Connecting SoC instrumentation to industry standard toolchains

A practical debug workflow depends on clean integration with existing debug/trace infrastructure. Tessent Embedded Analytics is designed to connect to industry-standard debug tools so that engineers can access instrumentation, trace, and analytics data using familiar bring-up flows—without having to build one-off scripts and data pipelines for each program.

For example, vendors such as Ashling provide hardware interfaces (e.g., Opella-XD and Vitra-XS) that bridge the host environment to the target SoC over JTAG and, when available, higher-bandwidth trace links. In addition to basic run-control, these probes can provide access paths for embedded trace and functional monitoring data that provides insight into functional behavior. With support for architectures such as RISC-V, the tooling can provide access to the Tessent Embedded Analytics Host SDK Communicator interface, enabling comprehensive visibility of on-chip behavior.

From trace to root cause: Host software for debug and analysis

Hardware access is only part of the story; productivity typically depends on the host software used to configure capture, control execution, and analyze results. Tools such as Ashling’s RiscFree SDK provide an integrated IDE/debug environment that consolidates common pieces of the bring-up stack (editor, run-control, GDB integration, OpenOCD flows, multi-core awareness) and can be used to drive trace capture and post-processing alongside application debug.

Image: Ashling RiscFree Tool

With environments like RiscFree, engineering teams can move from first-boot bring-up to multi-core and heterogeneous debug while keeping trace configuration, capture, and analysis in one place. Pairing that with the automation and functional monitoring capabilities in the Tessent Embedded Analytics Host Suite reduces debug iteration loops.

Who this is for (and when it matters)

The unified approach of Tessent Embedded Analytics Host Suite and Ashling RiscFree is relevant to semiconductor and system teams building advanced SoCs (including RISC-V-based designs) where visibility, trace depth, and post-silicon observability are limiting factors for schedule and quality. For teams requiring high-fidelity debug, extensive trace capabilities, and robust post-deployment analytics, this unified approach supports faster development cycles, more efficient validation, and the delivery of highly reliable products in today’s competitive silicon landscape.