Articles
Mentor Graphics unveils VRTX development system for ARM Applications
November 14, 2000
With the move to SoC design methodologies, designers face acute time-to-market pressures. For 3G mobile handset manufacturers in particular, a failed or delayed product release could mean the difference between market success and failure. To alleviate the risks involved in SoC design, Mentor provides a scalable, reliable, reduced-footprint RTOS, coupled with a range of RTOS-aware development tools, that are uniquely tailored to the needs of both application and system-level debugging.
New for ARM powered applications is an enhanced version of the VRTXsa RTOS, which has been optimized to reduce footprint, minimize code size, and to offer superior performance in both ARM and Thumb execution states. The enhanced RTOS offers the same scalability, reliability and performance features found in other VRTX development suites, such as per-call configuration of the system and priority inheritance, a feature designed to prevent performance problems such as priority inversion.
"The small footprint and high-functionality of VRTX make it ideal for SoC-based mobile applications and will become even more important with the introduction of future 3G systems," said Mark Saunders, senior product marketing manager, Mentor Graphics Embedded Software Division. "ARM is the undisputed leader in the mobile telephony market and our VRTX RTOS is exploiting a phenomenal growth opportunity in this market with features such as high-performance, scalability, and best-in-class debugging solutions winning over several leading handset manufacturers."
The VRTX Development System, used to build VRTX-based applications, provides users with configuration and build tools as well as two distinct but complementary levels of debugging support — the System and Application Developer's Kits — based on the XRAY Debugger, that help to ensure speedy deployment of SoC solutions.
The System Developer's Kit includes an XRAY RDI Debugger with built-in VRTX awareness and connectivity to both the ARMulator (Instruction-Set Simulator) and hardware-assist solutions - including the ARM Multi-ICE unit with comprehensive ARM core support - offering complete, instruction-by-instruction control over the target code. This kit is targeted at engineers developing device drivers, boot code, and the hardware/software interface.
The Application Developer's Kit utilizes the Spectra Backplane to provide unique, unobtrusive, application-level debugging and performance profiling. In addition to fast, network-wide connectivity, the Spectra Backplane enables the debugger to not only view and edit system resources, such as queues and threads, but also supports run-mode debugging. In run-mode, the debugger is able to stop a single thread on the target and allow all the other threads to remain active, as opposed to the stop-mode solution provided in the System Developer's Kit, in which a breakpoint stops the whole system.
The combination of System and Application Developer's Kits provides the most complete range of debugging connections possible for ARM core-based application developers using VRTX. With these new approaches to the debugging problem, developers will have access to the unique multi-tasking debug features of XRAY regardless of the connection options and they select and the debugging tasks they need to complete.
Edited by Bruce A. Bennett
Managing Editor, Embedded Technology.com
