Macraigor Systems has expanded its on-chip debug technology, OCDemon, to support the latest Intel Atom x86 processor. Built with tiny transistors, the Intel Atom processor was designed for low-power mobile internet devices and simple, low-cost PCs. JTAG debug solutions do not require an operating system on the device and is therefore suitable for firmware debugging as well as bootcode. Through the JTAG interface, the target hardware is connected to the debugger on the host system.This allows in-depth access of IA-specific features for execution trace support and system-on-a-chip and chipset peripheral register content. OCDemon offers an optimised interface to these on-chip resources via a choice of communication channels. A host debugger communicates with a Macraigor Systems device and then to the target processor. Since there is no need for any resident code, this debug method is available for hardware initialisation and debug as well as kernel, driver and application software debug.
OCDemon has continued to be an Intel recommended JTAG debug solution for hardware manufactures that need to debug applications on host development platforms or remote TCP/IP sites. Macraigor is offering a free port of the GNU toolkit (gcc, gas and gdb) for the Atom processor on its website, as well as full support for Eclipse Ganymede. The Macraigor Eclipse Ganymede/Galileo and GNU Tools Suite is an implementation and packaging of the Eclipse Ganymede/Galileo platform, CDT (C/C++ development tooling) 5.0.x, and DSDP (device software development platform) 1.0 plug-ins, and a program called OCDRemote that provides an interface between Eclipse, the GDB debugger and a Macraigor on-chip debug device.
Macraigor's JTAG interface devices are immediately available for use with the Intel Atom-based designs as well as other Intel devices including the XScale range of processors.
