TASKING DSP Tool Suites Meet the Needs of the Embedded Communications Market

New Releases Available for DSP56xxx and CARMEL

Dedham, Mass. - May 16, 2000

-- TASKING, the Embedded Communications Company, announced new releases of its tool suites for Motorola's DSP56xxx and Infineon's CARMEL platforms that provide the increased functionality and efficiency to address the complexity and time-to-market demands of embedded communications. Graphical performance analysis, enhanced register handling, increased code efficiency, and more granular debugging maximize developer productivity and fine tune application performance. The tool suites, which include TASKING's Embedded Development Environment (EDE), C compiler and CrossView Pro debugger, now feature superior memory bank management, startup code options, quick display of variable information as well as numerous compiler and assembler optimizations. With these enhancements, embedded communications developers are equipped to solve the complex design issues that are part of delivering advanced communication devices.

"Better than any other alternatives, our DSP tool suites meet the needs of customers creating embedded communications applications on the DSP56xxx and CARMEL platforms," said Laura Horn, TASKING's DSP/32-bit Product Marketing Manager. "More and more companies want to harness the power of DSP technology to develop and distinguish their embedded communications devices in this highly competitive segment. The TASKING tools meet that need, giving developers the foundation required for wireless, modems, networking or handheld devices using whatever protocols -- VoIP, WAP, TCP/IP or others -- are best for their applications."

The DSP56xxx Tool Suite -- still the only alternative to Motorola's free GNU tools -- further eases migration from the GNU tools significantly challenged by complex communications tasks, by linking COFF files containing relative branches. With this release, the DSP56xxx compiler optimizations achieve up to a 20% improvement in floating-point performance, while debugging capabilities pinpoint performance issues, speeding resolution of problems. By using the same memory model options for the compiler and assembler, TASKING simplifies application development, enabling programmers to model and stack memory during code generation. On-chip debugging, serial port drivers and file-system simulation offer developers a new level of flexibility. The CrossView Pro debugger offers the ability to commandeer one of the timers to count instructions/cycles and to single step without stopping if an interrupt occurs.

"Using TASKING's DSP56xxx tools, we reduced development time by a factor of three to four," says Mike Ray, Software Engineering Manager at IVL Technologies, the world leader in vocal processing technology for the professional audio, music, and karaoke markets. "With the next-generation products currently in development, we expect this reduction to be even greater."

With CARMEL's strengths in third-generation wireless and broadband connectivity applications, the CARMEL Tool Suite strengthens TASKING's commitment to both the DSP and embedded communications markets. The tool suite supports compiler optimizations, language extensions for DSP applications, and the configurable long instruction word technology of the Infineon CARMEL DSP Core. TASKING's C-like assembler combines the performance of assembly language with the ease of a C compiler, while offering low-level control with function-like instructions for math, procedures, program flow and hardware repeat instructions. Enhancements to the CrossView Pro debugger let developers examine pipeline stages, complex breakpoints and register groupings through both the cycle-accurate simulator and on-chip-debugging-support.

CARMEL's high-performance, low-power consumption core and TASKING's superior software development tools provide an ideal solution for today's embedded communications needs. "Both Infineon and TASKING recognize the importance of embedded communications markets," says Shaul Berger, Vice President of Infineon's DSP Cores. "Our combined strengths set a worldwide standard in open-architecture DSPs, which are capturing an ever-increasing percentage of the market." With support for EONIC System's Virtuoso RTOS that is ideally suited for DSP and ASIC applications, developers can automatically scale their application to nano- and micro-kernel footprints.

Recognizing the need for developers to respond efficiently to more complex tasks, both the DSP56xxx and CARMEL tool suites offer immediate graphical feedback. For quick error detection of the signal input, TASKING's graphical signal data analysis reduces large sets of data into meaningful visual diagrams using pre- or user-defined specifications in five formats: x-t plotting, x-y plotting, FFT power spectrum, FFT waterfall and Eye diagram. In addition to letting developers group registers, for example, by special function, floating point, and UART, the enhanced register handling automatically updates register values. Bubble Spy technology displays variable or function values in a popup box activated by mouse-point positioning. These visual improvements, along with symbolic register editing, offer developers the most powerful and simple solution for addressing complex digital signal processing needs.

TASKING Inc., 333 Elm Street, Dedham, MA 02026-4530. Tel: 781-320-9400; Fax: 781-320-9212.