Skip to Content

Real Time Hardware Instruction Trace Overview

Last modified by Microchip on 2023/12/20 21:07

Note: This feature is only supported on the MPLAB® REAL ICE™ in-circuit emulator.

Real Time Hardware Instruction Trace is a real-time dump of the program execution stream that can be captured and analyzed. The functionality that is provided includes:

  • Full instruction execution information up to 32 MHz
  • Trace through Reset conditions
  • Trace buffer with optional stall

Emulation header trace is similar to PIC32 instruction trace, which is a non-intrusive hardware instruction trace. You can use trace to capture every instruction executed by the device. The trace data is output from the device (using the pins TRCLK, TRDAT[6:0], and TRSTALL) to the emulator. The emulator streams this data to a trace buffer, that acts like a rolling first-in/first-out (FIFO) buffer, on the PC.

The amount of trace data is limited only by the size of the trace buffer. This buffer can fill quickly even when set to the maximum size, so it is wise to determine exactly what you need to capture.

Note: Execution will NOT HALT when this external buffer is full. However, MPLAB X IDE will announce when the trace buffer has overflowed.

Trace requires hardware and software setup before trace data can be viewed in a window. Continue to Set Up Trace Hardware.