ESC Silicon Valley – Day 1

The Silicon Valley version of the Embedded Systems Conference is cranking up and my inbox is already flooded with press releases. To give you a taste of what’s new this year, I plan to highlight a few of these announcements during the week. For example, Express Logic, a San Diego-based developer of real-time operating systems has decided to jump into the development tools market for embedded systems.  Earlier today they announced the BenchX Integrated Development Environment (IDE) based on the Eclipse open source platform. BenchX is tailored for embedded development, and supports the ARM, PowerPC, ColdFire, and MIPS processor architectures. BenchX includes GNU C/C++ compilers, a graphical debugger, an instruction set simulator, and a USB or Ethernet target connection probe for download and debug. This tools package can be used as-is, or further enhanced with Eclipse plug-in compilers such as ARM’s RealView , Freescale’s CodeWarrior , MIPS’ SDE, IAR’s Embedded Workbench, or any of the many Eclipse community plug-ins that provide additional functionality. BenchX includes kernel-aware debugger support for Express Logic’s ThreadX RTOS, but it can be used for development using any other RTOS, or no RTOS at all. BenchX licenses are priced from $1,000 per seat, including debug probe, documentation, and three months of technical support.