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[dsdp-tm-dev] Invitation to help launch of The Spirit Consortium's Debug Working Group

This e-mail is a call to action for those people interested in automated configuration of debugging environments.  The SPIRIT Consortium is looking to apply the IP-XACT standard in the area of machine-interpretable descriptions of debug targets.  This effort is kicking off in September, and early results from this work will be emerging in early H1 2007.  Those people interested in helping improve flow-integration for the debug ecosystem, including modeling, design tool and hard prototyping environments, may want to consider participating in this new activity.
 
Motivation:
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As embedded systems become more complex, and timescales for system development have become shorter, the effort required to describe such systems to software debug tools has constantly increased. A large part of this problem is that each debug tool requires its own description of the target system, and, in most cases, these descriptions have to be written manually.   With regular design iteration between multiple representations of a design in ESL, implementation and hard-prototype formats, hand authoring of target descriptions is becoming impractical.  It is necessary to develop a standard for the description of debug targets that can be generated, maintained and interpreted by the multiple environments that represent a design today.
 
Proposal:
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We believe that the IP-XACT standard from The Spirit Consortium (www.spiritconsortium.org)  has the basic elements to form such a multi-vendor standard . This has a number of advantages:
  • IP-XACT is an existing standard that is already able to describe much of the information needed by debug tools. As such the developers of the standard for debug target descriptions can leverage this existing work, hence drastically reducing the time and effort needed to develop such a standard.   In some cases, prototypes of its usage are already in evidence. 
  • Many hardware design tools (EDA and ESL tools) are able to generate IP-XACT descriptions of hardware, and use these descriptions to exchange information about the hardware during the hardware design process. Debug tools can make use of descriptions generated as part of the hardware design process, hence drastically reducing the work required to generate debug target descriptions. 
  • Formal semantics to check the validity of IP-XACT descriptions are part of The SPIRIT Consortium standards.  This means that infrastructure for checking these generated descriptions is in place for the current standards, and will be extended to support IP-XACT for debug. 
Based on market requests, The Spirit Consortium  has  decided to create a new technical working group to standardize the use of IP-XACT to describe debug targets, and have appointed me interim chairman of the group. The attached draft charter describes the role of this working group. I would like to invite you help launch this group by participating in its first meeting.
 
The first meeting is open to all interested parties, whether or not they are members of The SPIRIT Consortium. You may participate in the meeting either by web and phone conferencing, or in person at ARM Cambridge .  The meeting will run from 4pm to 6pm UK time on Wednesday the 13th of September.
 
The main agenda items at this meeting will be:
1 - An introduction to The  SPIRIT  Consortium and IP-XACT.
2 - An introduction to the use of IP-XACT for debug target description
3 - A review of the proposed charter of the working group. 
4 - Discussion of compelling milestones for delivery (foundation for a schedule) 
 - A review of the group's working arrangements, and in particular its arrangements for interworking with other industry groups working in this area; including Eclipse Debug DSDP (Device Software Development Platform) Project, and SPRINT WP4.
 
Logistics
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For a map, and directions to, ARM's Cambridge office see  http://www.arm.com/contact_us/ARM_Cambridge.html 
 
For remote participation you will need to participate in both the conference call and the web conference. The conference call details are:
UK Number : 0870 411 6949

- this is the main dial in number for UK based participants. When you dial in, the call will be answered with 'Welcome to MeetingZone' and you will be prompted to enter your access code followed by #. You will then be asked to give your name, then press #. If you are not the chair person, you will hear music until the chair person joins the call and enters the HostAccessCode number.

International Number: +44 207081 9352

Participant Access Code: 763897#

The web conference can be accessed through the URL

Please let me know if you intend to participate in this meeting.
 
    Anthony Berent
 
    Interim Chairman, Debug Working Group.
 

    +44 1223 400763

-- IMPORTANT NOTICE: The contents of this email and any attachments are confidential and may also be privileged. If you are not the intended recipient, please notify the sender immediately and do not disclose the contents to any other person, use it for any purpose, or store or copy the information in any medium.  Thank you.

Attachment: Debug TWG charter.doc
Description: MS-Word document


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