Mentor Graphics EDGE™ Tool Suite Supports Freescale ColdFire Microprocessors and Microcontrollers

Wilsonville, OR - Mentor Graphics Corporation recently announced that its Eclipse-powered EDGE™ integrated development environment (IDE) and debugger now support the ColdFire® family of microprocessors and microcontrollers from Freescale Semiconductor. This they claim gives developers designing with ColdFire an advanced, embedded tool suite for developing, compiling, debugging, and deploying embedded applications, quickly and cost-efficiently.

According to Mentor Graphics Corporation the other features of EDGE™ are:

• The EDGE™ Tool Suite, based on the Eclipse platform, provides a set of plug-ins to Eclipse. The EDGE software includes an IDE, compiler, debugger and system profiler, all of which work together to allow developers to create products from concept to deployment. The EDGE software gives embedded developers tighter tool integration, total control over the quality and stability of their applications, full control of release cycles, shorter learning curves and a common platform with desktop tools.
• The EDGE™ software, which includes tutorials and demos, contains a graphical user interface (GUI) that permits users to interact with the GUI while the EDGE software is busy running background tasks such as building the user application. This is particularly useful when debugging large applications with multiple cores, as engineers typically focus on different parts of their application, concurrently.
• Adhering to the Eclipse platform debug paradigm, and hence offering ultimate openness, the EDGE™ Debugger provides developers with a number of debugging environments. For example, using host-based debugging, software developers can experiment by running an application on the host machine before the final hardware is available or even decided upon. This allows the software developer to start coding earlier in the development cycle.
• The EDGE™ Debugger also provides basic execution and memory control, plus advanced debugging features such as run-mode debug and kernel awareness when using a real-time operating system (RTOS). It also provides real-time trace, profiling, performance analysis, and code coverage for doing sophisticated code analysis. Additionally, the EDGE Debugger offers embedded developers true multi-core debugging, allowing them to fully debug their complete embedded system, whether small or complex.

SOURCE: Mentor Graphics Corporation