IAR Systems provides tools for new Atmel | SMART SAMA5D2 series

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IAR Embedded Workbench supports latest series of Atmel | SMART ARM Cortex-A5-based microprocessors with low power consumption and advanced security features.

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Our friends over at IAR Systems have shared that the IAR Embedded Workbench for ARM now supports the Atmel | SMART SAMA5D2 series. With its highly optimizing build tools and comprehensive debugging capabilities, their popular development toolchain enables developers to fully leverage the high performance of the recently revealed MPU family.

The Atmel | SMART SAMA5D2 is based on the high-end ARM Cortex-A5 core and features an ARM NEON engine. ARM NEON is a Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) architecture extension providing the top performance that is crucial to developers working for example with multimedia and signal processing applications. With the IAR Embedded Workbench for ARM, users will be able to benefit from this technology thanks to the automatic NEON vectorization available in the tools. By vectorizing their code, they can achieve faster application response time, improve application battery lifetime and further meet the market demands for low cost and low power.

What’s more, the SAMA5D2 boasts a robust security system including ARM TrustZone technology, along with secure boot, hardware cryptography, RSA/ECC, on-the-fly encryption/decryption on DDR and QSPI memories, tamper resistance, memory scrambling, independent watchdog, temperature, voltage and frequency monitoring and a unique ID in each device.

The complete development toolchain IAR Embedded Workbench for ARM features the powerful IAR C/C++ Compiler and the comprehensive C-SPY Debugger in a user-friendly integrated development environment. The toolchain offers extensive debugging and profiling possibilities such as complex code and data breakpoints, runtime stack analysis, call stack visualization, code coverage analysis and integrated monitoring of power consumption. For complete code control, IAR Systems provides integrated add-on tools for static and runtime analysis.

“We are excited to see early support for our latest low-power MPUs in IAR Systems’ leading development toolchain,” explains Jacko Wilbrink, Atmel Senior Director of MPUs. “In order to be able to develop next-generation industrial IoT and wearables applications, developers require more performance, lower power and additional security. The Atmel | SMART SAMA5D2 series and IAR Embedded Workbench deliver excellent performance and a wide range of features to fulfill these requirements and deliver truly differentiating products to help bring products faster to market.”

Interested? You can head over to the IAR Embedded Workbench for ARM, as well as read up on the industry’s lowest power Cortex-A5-based MPU here.

IAR Systems introduces static code analysis in Atmel AVR32 tools

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The latest version of IAR Systems’ toolchain integrates C-STAT as well as stack usage analysis and parallel build.

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IAR Systems, a leading provider of software tools for embedded systems, has revealed several major updates to its complete embedded development toolchain IAR Embedded Workbench for Atmel AVR32. The latest version, 4.30, introduces the add-on product C-STAT for completely integrated static code analysis, as well as stack usage analysis and shortened build times through parallel build.

Static analysis finds potential issues in code by delving deeper on the source code level, given that errors such as memory leaks, access violations, arithmetic errors and array and string overruns can cause security issues and affect the overall performance and quality of a product. By using static analysis, developers can identify these errors early on, and ultimately, minimize their impact on the finished product and the project timeline. Aside from improving the code quality, the analysis can assist in aligning with industry coding standards. C-STAT is a powerful static analysis tool that checks compliance with rules as defined by the coding standards MISRA C:2004, MISRA C++:2008 and MISRA C:2012, as well as hundreds of rules based on for example CWE (the Common Weakness Enumeration) and CERT C/C++. Users can easily select which rule-set and which individual rules to check the code against, and the analysis results are provided directly in the IAR Embedded Workbench IDE.

The new version also adds stack usage analysis. The stack is a fundamental property of an embedded system and a proper setup of the stack is essential to system stability and reliability. However, calculating the stack space is notoriously hard, making worst case maximum stack depth very useful information as it greatly simplifies estimates of how much stack an application will require. With stack usage analysis enabled in IAR Embedded Workbench, a stack usage section will be added to the linker map file with listings of the maximum stack depth for each call graph root. The analysis process can be customized to take into account such constructs as calls via function pointers and recursion. The output can optionally be generated in XML format for post processing.

In the compiler, parallel build has been introduced to help accelerate project times. The user can easily set the compiler to run in several parallel processes and make better use of the available processor cores in the PC. This feature can have a major impact on reducing the build times of the compiler.

As many of you are well aware, IAR Systems provides a plethora of powerful development tools for Atmel 8-bit and 32-bit families. And, IAR Embedded Workbench for AVR32 is a complete C/C++ compiler and debugger toolchain that creates the fastest, most compact code in the industry. Interested? Head over to its official page here to learn more.