An embodiment of the invention provides a memory on a semiconductor device that has a plurality of memory areas where each memory area has a plurality of consecutive bits. Further, the semiconductor device includes a tag memory having a plurality of trace tags, each trace tag including at least one bit. Each memory area of the memory is mapped to a trace tag that indicates whether the respective memory area is selected for tracing or not. Each memory area and the assigned trace tag are read out and address of the memory area is forwarded to a trace module when an assigned trace tag indicates that the memory area is selected for tracing. When the assigned trace tag indicates that the memory area is not selected for tracing, data and address is discarded.