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Venice, Florida — ARM announced at the Embedded Systems Conference the launch of the RealView® Development Suite version 3.1, in a continued effort to provide best-in-class integrated tools for creating embedded system software for the full line of ARM® processors.
RealView Development Suite 3.1 provides performance improvements and tuning for ARM processor support, most notably by providing better optimization for the full CortexTM processor family, including the just-announced Cortex-M1 processor, the first ARM product designed specifically for FPGA implementation.
As the first tool suite to support the new Cortex-M1 processor, the RealView Development Suite 3.1 ships with a complete Instruction Set System Model (ISSM) of the Cortex-M1 processor in addition to ISSMs of all previously announced Cortex processors. This provides software developers out-of-the-box support to create start-up code, firmware and boot operating systems on Cortex processors ahead of access to actual silicon.
As with the previous version of the RealView Development Suite, version 3.1 is fully interoperable with the RealView CREATE family of electronic system level (ESL) design tools and models, which speeds time to market for embedded systems developers by enabling concurrent hardware/software development.
To further improve code density for the range of ARM processor-based applications, the suite features a new optional microlib C library (a subset of the ISO standard C run time library), which has been minimized in size for microcontroller applications. The microlib C library achieves an amazing 92 percent reduction in run-time library code size.
Ease of Use Improvements
The RealView Development Suite 3.1, which now supports the latest ANSI C99 language standard, offers a consistent debug interface for all stages of product development and all ARM architectures, across the entire range of development platforms, such as cycle accurate models, fast virtual prototyping environments, FPGA implementation and test silicon.
For the first time, users developing for applications processors with the high-performance ARM NEONTM SIMD signal processing architecture can separately license an add-on vectorizing compiler that complements the RealView Development Suite 3.1.
The RealView ICE version 3.1 run control unit and its RealView Trace module, used in conjunction with RealView Development Suite 3.1, now offer extended support for the ARM CoreSightTM debug and trace technology. Developers can now configure the CoreSight trace system for multiple trace streams through a single trace port. The CoreSight Serial Wire Debug interface is also supported, which allows silicon designers to reduce the pin count required for debug to just two pins.
Additionally, the open-source Eclipse Integrated Development Environment is now incorporated into the RealView Development Suite. This integration combines Eclipse's source code development tools and plug-in framework with ARM compilation and debug technology. The new Eclipse-based project wizard automatically and optimally configures the tools for the chosen ARM processor and development board.
Further, intrinsics support in the new suite for ARM DSP instruction set extensions, ETSI functions and TI C55x DSPs means that developers no longer need to write their signal processing operations in assembly language, but rather as C intrinsics. The compiler does the work of register allocation and scheduling automatically.
The RealView Development Suite version 3.1 is currently in use by lead ARM Partners, and will be generally available in Q2 2007 from ARM and its RealView distributor network.
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