Lauterbach, is pleased to announce that their open source JTAG Switcher has been awarded “Product of the Year 2020” by Elektronik Magazine. The JTAG Switcher is being released into the public domain under the MIT Open Source License.
In a modern multi-processing environment, a system may comprise of many disparate processors, each focusing on a particular processing task. Multi-processor JTAG works by chaining the devices’ debug interfaces together. Often these have incompatible debug interfaces, for example they may have different voltage requirements. With modern processors capable of entering very low power modes, the debug interface of any processor may be powered down at any time and this breaks the chain and prevents debugging of any device attached to it. The JTAG Switcher is designed to overcome all of these issues. It can work with cores that use different voltages and can seamlessly adapt to changing chain lengths as cores go into and out of low power states.
JTAG Switcher is provided as VHDL code that can be put into an FPGA, but it might also be directly integrated into silicon if several internal JTAG TAPs need to be accessed inside one integrated circuit.
The JTAG Switcher VHDL code will be published on GitLab soon.