Glossary
Glossary-4
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BE-32
Big-endian view of memory in a word-invariant system.
See also
BE-8, LE, Byte-invariant and Word-invariant.
Big-endian
Byte ordering scheme in which bytes of decreasing significance in a data word are
stored at increasing addresses in memory.
See also
Little-endian and Endianness.
Big-endian memory
Memory in which:
•
a byte or halfword at a word-aligned address is the most significant byte or
halfword within the word at that address
•
a byte at a halfword-aligned address is the most significant byte within the
halfword at that address.
See also
Little-endian memory.
Boundary scan chain
A boundary scan chain is made up of serially-connected devices that implement
boundary scan technology using a standard JTAG TAP interface. Each device contains
at least one TAP controller containing shift registers that form the chain connected
between
TDI
and
TDO
, through which test data is shifted. Processors can contain
several shift registers to enable you to access selected parts of the device.
Branch folding
Branch folding is a technique where the branch instruction is completely removed from
the instruction stream presented to the execution pipeline.
Breakpoint
A breakpoint is a mechanism provided by debuggers to identify an instruction at which
program execution is to be halted. Breakpoints are inserted by the programmer to enable
inspection of register contents, memory locations, variable values at fixed points in the
program execution to test that the program is operating correctly. Breakpoints are
removed after the program is successfully tested.
See also
Watchpoint.
Burst
A group of transfers to consecutive addresses. Because the addresses are consecutive,
there is no requirement to supply an address for any of the transfers after the first one.
This increases the speed at which the group of transfers can occur. Bursts over AMBA
are controlled using signals to indicate the length of the burst and how the addresses are
incremented.
See also
Beat.
Byte
An 8-bit data item.