Technical Publications

OEM/ODM designers, engineers, and processor suppliers typically all have enormous expertise in secure authentication, routing, or wireless applications, but typically, not in JTAG per IEEE 1149.1 or core IP JTAG debug logic. Minimizing the number of setup details means an easier and faster transition to the goal of designing, developing, and differentiating a product.

This paper explains the issues and concepts that require a JTAG connection and how it provides much needed visibility and control of a modern processor core-based system.

Embedded developers need a set of compiler tools that can take C, C++, or assembly language, and produce reliable code for their embedded target. What's also needed is flexibility in code optimizations for space, execution speed, and some middle ground in between. And finally, developers need a complete set of compiler tools that reliably produce executable binaries. The Microtec C/C++ Compiler for PowerPC is a complete cross-compiler solution that includes a compiler, assembler, and linker – all designed exclusively for building embedded applications. This paper discusses the many advantages of the Microtec C/C++ Compiler which go far beyond traditional compilers.

Electronic devices are evolving at a breakneck pace as manufacturers strive to differentiate from the crowd with more features, lower power consumption, and a better user experience. Such enhancements might be great for the end user, but they cause major headaches for the software developer who must deliver ever more sophisticated software on top of ever more complex silicon, and still get products out the door on time and within budget. What's needed is a new kind of development platform which empowers electronic devices: flexible enough to be reused across a wide range of products and scalable enough to exploit the unique capabilities of any target silicon. Introducing Nucleus Platform Solutions from Mentor Graphics ...

Many types of embedded software are driven by performance. Increasing performance of the software can lead to savings by requiring less CPU horsepower to run the application, thus enabling more functionality to be added, or by allowing the application to be possible at all. In the following article, I will show three techniques that have been valuable in measuring and increasing embedded software performance learned through my firsthand embedded experience.

When a software developer is acquiring a compiler, a primary consideration is the code quality produced by the compiler. But other features that are not required by the ANSI language description (that are tailored to embedded developer needs) can make the developer's task simpler to maintain. This paper investigates some desirable features of compilers used in embedded application development, and some techniques for making use of these features.

Hardware performance features available for embedded software to exploit are reviewed, including both recent advances as well as past trends. Hardware performance depends on clock speed and a large and still growing bag of tricks to discover and exploit concurrency in the problem being solved. The embedded software designer should be aware of the underlying hardware performance features in order to make the best design decisions. In particular, the recent advances in SIMD instruction sets, hardware multi-threading and single chip, multicore processors require explicit measures to exploit them in software.