SWAT: Your New Software Trace Ally

From hardware roots to software-enabled possibilities.

July 21, 2025

At TASKING, trac­ing has evolved from hard­ware-only capa­bil­i­ties to a full ecosys­tem of hard­ware and soft­ware solu­tions.

What is SWAT?

SWAT (Soft­ware Trace Tool) is a light­weight, soft­ware-based trac­ing solu­tion for embed­ded sys­tems. It enables real-time pro­fil­ing and tim­ing analy­sis on micro­con­trollers that lack hard­ware trace. You only need the exist­ing debug inter­face (Hard­ware Debug­ger Blue­Box iC7pro / iC7max); no addi­tion­al com­mu­ni­ca­tion pro­to­cols are need­ed.
It runs with min­i­mal run­time over­head and no hard­ware mod­i­fi­ca­tions.

Getting Started with SWAT

Inte­grat­ing SWAT is a fast and struc­tured process:

With the TASKING SWAT, adding soft­ware trac­ing to your AUTOSAR appli­ca­tion is easy!

You’ll start with the pro­vid­ed Tar­get Code Inte­gra­tion Pack­age. No changes to your appli­ca­tion logic are required. Then, enable a few OS and RTE hooks, and let the iTCHi Wiz­ard do the heavy lift­ing: it gen­er­ates the required Soft­ware Trace Con­fig­u­ra­tion and Pro­fil­er XML files auto­mat­i­cal­ly.

Next, you’ll need to allo­cate the SWAT buffer (just a glob­al mem­o­ry block) and build your project.

Final­ly, con­fig­ure winIDEA with a few clicks, hit the Record but­ton, and instant­ly visu­al­ize your application’s run­time behav­ior — threads, Runnables, sig­nals, and more.

With every­thing in place, you’re ready to cap­ture trace data and gain run­time insights. SWAT also has the pow­er­ful abil­i­ty to record syn­chro­nized traces with mul­ti­ple trace sources.

SWAT Benefits, Unpacked

  • Min­i­mal impact on sys­tem tim­ing (avoids inter­rupt dis­abling and idle loop instru­men­ta­tion)
  • Min­i­mal run­time over­head
  • Reuses exist­ing debug inter­face (iC7pro/iC7max) for con­tin­u­ous trace data stream­ing
  • Con­tin­u­ous stream­ing through soft­ware-based syn­chro­niza­tion
  • Inte­grates with winIDEA Ana­lyz­er for visu­al­iza­tion, time­lines, and sta­tis­tics
  • Exports trace data in BTF and MDF4 for­mats
  • Deep insights into appli­ca­tion tim­ing and CPU uti­liza­tion
  • Eval­u­ates run­times, response times, and OS sched­ul­ing
  • Com­pat­i­ble with auto­mo­tive com­pil­ers, OSes, and MCU archi­tec­tures

Today, we are your one-stop shop for trac­ing, sup­port­ing both hard­ware and soft­ware trac­ing to give embed­ded develop­ment broad­er access to trace data and new lev­els of insight and effi­cien­cy.

Learn and Explore

Want a deep­er look at SWAT’s capa­bil­i­ties and con­fig­u­ra­tion options?

Check our SWAT Doc­u­men­ta­tion in winIDEA Help!

Our On-demand webi­nar is now ava­iable to watch.

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