News and New Products

ARM Aims for Hardware/Software Co-development

By Suzanne Deffree -- Electronic News, 4/3/2006

ARM today announced the release of its RealView 3.0, a development suite that promises true hardware/software co-development for SoC designers and embedded system architects.

Debuted at the opening day of the Embedded Systems Conference Silicon Valley in San Jose, the release’s features include a compiler optimization engine that results in more than 10 percent improvement on the EEMBC score, a debug engine with multicore DSP awareness, high-performance compilation of Linux, and GNU tools interoperability.

“People need tools for the entire design flow, starting at very early concept of what’s the IP going to be, right around to the finish,” said Brian McAllister, director of marketing for development systems at ARM. “We’re seeing a lot of people do hardware and software co-design, starting them at the same time. We have interfaces to allow debugs to happen either through real products or through models.”

To speed time-to-market for embedded systems developers as well as hardware developers through hardware/software co-development, the tool is fully interoperable with the electronic system level (ESL) simulation models generated by the RealView CREATE family of ESL tools, ARM said.

“Taking advantage of ESL tools for architectural exploration and system simulation is one of the highest-value activities that systems designers can undertake,” said Daya Nadamuni, a VP at Gartner Dataquest. “It facilitates an optimized design, with functions appropriately apportioned between hardware and software, and allows true pre-silicon software development.”

The company has integrated support for a number of ARM and third-party technologies into this latest version of RealView. In addition to supporting all ARM processors including the ARM11 MPCore multiprocessor, the suite is the first development toolchain to provide support for the ARM Cortex-M3 and Cortex-A8 processors, as well as for future Cortex family processors, the company said.

The majority of ARM’s development systems group’s customers are in mobile consumer segment, McAllister said, noting the importance of Cortex there. “The areas we see growth in are new design-ins with new architectural introductions, like Cortex, and pushing into things like automotive, consumer and MCU. The MCU, specifically, is an area that we see ARM growing in the embedded space,” he added.

ARM has further integrated an intrinsic compiler for its NEON 64/128-bit hybrid SIMD technology developed to accelerate the performance of multimedia and signal processing applications; support for its advanced CoreSight debug and trace technology, which provides software developers with more visibility to debug multi-core devices while saving pins and silicon area; and support for its TrustZone hardware-based security technology. The RealView suite also allows optional integration with Eclipse.

“For the RealView Development Suite 3.0, we focused on three key benefits for system developers: providing an end-to-end tool flow; enabling integration with key ARM technologies, as well as Eclipse and Linux; and optimizing system performance and compilation of Linux applications,” said David Rusling, ARM fellow and director of technology, development systems. “These three benefits greatly accelerate right-first-time development by enabling collaboration between hardware architects and software designers.”

Both MontaVista Software and Nokia came out in support of the technology today, with MontaVista saying its customers can achieve significant code size reduction for Linux applications with the tool and Nokia offering RealView 3.0 to Symbian OS OEM developers.

The ARM RealView 3.0 is available now.