Last week, Mentor Graphics announced its Embedded Sourcery CodeBench product, a next-generation integrated development environment (IDE) based on the open-source GNU tool chain. The Sourcery CodeBench technology provides embedded developers with a powerful and easy-to-use tool suite for developing and optimizing systems based on a broad range of devices from the most advanced microprocessors to microcontrollers.

The IDE, which is integrated with the company’s own probes as well as those from third parties, introduces support for the NetLogic Microsystems XLP multi-core processor, Freescale Kinetis, and Xilinx Zynq. The Sourcery CodeBench product. The comprehensive tool suite comprises an IDE based on Eclipse, the Eclipse C/C++ development tools and compilers, and GNU tool chain, including an assembler, linker, run-time libraries, and source- and assembly-level debuggers.

The Sourcery CodeBench IDE includes the Mentor’s new Embedded Sourcery System Analyzer technology, a tool that helps embedded developers quickly visualize and analyze system data. By allowing embedded developers to understand the performance characteristics of an application or a complete system, the analyzer can locate bottlenecks so the embedded developer can debug or decode these problem areas easily and improve design performance. Execution data is collected from several sources including the Linux and Nucleus operating systems. The Linux Trace Toolkit (LTTng) provides a broad view of Linux behavior in operation to gain insight on how the resources and processors are being used.

The analyzer tool lets the user manually apply trace point placements anywhere in the application to identify the start and end (and points in-between) of a critical section of code that the developer wants to explore. The user trace points can then be displayed and manipulated with the analyzer to identify and fix problems.

The Mentor Embedded Sourcery CodeBench Personal Edition is available starting at $199. The Professional Version with System Analyzer starts at $2799.

Richard Nass