Green Hills Software Announces Advanced Debug Support For ARM's Embedded Trace Macrocell
"The ETM interface gives the MULTI debugger unique and invaluable visibility into the execution of sophisticated ARM programs," said John Carbone, vice president of marketing at Green Hills Software. "MULTI provides full support for the ETM's advanced real-time trace, navigation, correlation and control features, which are essential for developers of disk drives, voice-over-IP (VoIP) gateways, and other deeply embedded systems."
"The MULTI debugger is a good example of how to take advantage of the ETM's unique access and control features," said Rod Crawford, director of third-party software products for ARM. "With the MULTI debugger and ETM interface, ARM programmers can extract, navigate and correlate meaningful trace data using a range of sophisticated trigger conditions."
The ARMO processor's ETM interface provides debug capabilities that are superior to those commonly associated with JTAG. Through the ETM interface, MULTI users can upload and view data for ARM programs as the programs execute in real time, search trace data, correlate function names and variable names with trace data, and monitor both instruction fetch and memory access locations. They can also set and store simple and complex trigger points for trace data collection, and load/save trace data to disk for post mortern analysis or simulation.
The MULTI debugger interacts with the ARM processor's ETM interface through either the Agilent Logic Analyzer, which performs high-speed data collection, or the Agilent Trace Port Analyzer, which provides real-time data collection at slower speeds. Both the Trace Port Analyzer and Logic Analyzer use the Agilent Emulation Probe to control the ETM interface.
The MULTI debugger decompresses ETM data (received via the Logic Analyzer or Trace Port Analyzer), displays it, and correlates it with program and function variables. The debugger provides trace buffer control, which makes it easy for programmers to navigate the trace data. It also supports simple and complex ETM triggers, which enable users to start and stop trace data collections based on activities such as hitting particular program locations. MULTI supports trace data widths of 4, 8, or 16 bits, depending on how ETM is implemented on a particular processor.
The MULTI 2000 IDE, together with Green Hills' family of optimizing C, C + +, and EC + + compilers, automates all aspects of software development for most major embedded processors, including those from ARM, Motorola, MIPS, Infineon, and Hitachi. Available for Windows and Unix host platforms, the MULTI IDE features a window-oriented editor, sourcelevel debugger, graphical program builder, run-time error checker, version control system, performance profiler, optimizing profiler (CodeBalancel), and real-time RTOS EventAnalyzer. MULTI also features an instruction set simulator (SimARM) that allows programmers to develop and test code on a PC or workstation without the need for the target hardware.
The heart of the MULTI environment is a source-level debugger with incremental debug capability that supports process- and system-level debug. The debugger provides a separate window for each process, supports mixed assembly and high-level language formats, includes a language-sensitive expression evaluator, and provides special support for C+ + (such as a Class Browser, object display and template debug capability) and X-Windows debugging. The MULTI 2000 debugger is fully RTOS aware, which enables designers to debug and tune their applications at a task level. With the MULTI debugger, designers working with popular RTOSs like ThreadX8 can start and stop tasks, and monitor OS resources like buffers, queues, and streams.
MULTI 2000's EventAnalyzer builds on the debugger's real-time capabilities, graphically displaying system and application events on an expandable timeline in real time. Operating like a high-level logic analyzer, the EventAnalyzer GUI displays all context switches, ThreadX API calls, and interrupts in a time-relative manner using intuitive icons. The EventAnalyzer also provides versatile navigation capabilities that allow programmers to zoom in and out of the timeline to obtain greater detail about particular event sequences.
The MULTI 2000 IDE features the industry's most advanced ARM C/C+ + optimizing compiler. The scaleable C/C + + compiler lets programmers use switch options to select any subset of C + + they want, from bare bones C, to full-blown ANSFISO C + +. The compiler also supports Embedded C + + (EC + +), a dialect of C + + optimized for resourceconstrained embedded applications that achieves the efficiency of C while preserving many of the best object-oriented features of C + +.
ETM support comes bundled with MULTI 2000 at no additional charge. MULTI 2000 for Windows costs $5,900 (US). MULTI 2000 for Unix costs $8,900 (US). Both versions are available immediately.
Incorporated in 1982, Green Hills Software, Inc., is a leading supplier of software development tools for 32- and 64-bit embedded systems. Green Hills offers a family of optimizing C, C + +, Embedded C + +, Ada 95, FORTRAN and Pascal compilers. The company's unique MULTI Integrated Development Environment automates the edit-compiledebug cycle by integrating advanced facilities such as an RTOS-aware source-level debugger, performance profiler, program builder and version control system.
Green Hills Software's tools support all major 32-bit and 64-bit advanced microprocessor families and target environments, including instruction set simulators, ROM Monitors, commercial and home grown real-time operating systems (RTOS) and in-circuit emulators (ICE).
Green Hills Software is headquartered in Santa Barbara, CA., and has US offices in California, Colorado, Illinois, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Texas, and Florida. International headquarters are located in the United Kingdom, with offices in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden. For sales information on Green Hills Software products, please call 1-805-965-6044 or email inquiries to sales@ghs.com. http://www.ghs.com.