July 8th, Uppsala, Sweden – IAR Systems today announced that it has incorporated its newly developed power debug and analysis tools within IAR Embedded Workbench for ARM. Bucking the software industry’s trend of charging for new software features, IAR Systems has opted to include its innovative technology as standard.
The new tools provide the capability to correlate current sampling alongside program execution, allowing analysis of the software’s influence on power consumption and providing developers with the means to optimize source code to minimize power consumption.
“We are working with some of the largest suppliers of low-power microcontrollers in the industry, and have been for many years. It is a natural progression for us to extend our software analysis technology to include power debugging. We are providing software developers with the tools to tune their source code to minimize power consumption, this becoming a third dimension in addition to code size and speed,” said Mats Ullström, Product Director, IAR Systems.
The power measurements can be visualized in various ways in IAR Embedded Workbench. In its simplest form a power log window displays the measured current and the time and location of the program counter when it was sampled. This gives the developer detailed insight into an application’s power consumption.
An overview is provided as a graph of the power consumption presented in the timeline window in IAR Embedded Workbench, where the call stack, interrupt activity and variable values can be displayed simultaneously. This allows power consumption to be mapped against key events in the program’s execution and the developer can easily see what events triggers higher power consumption.
Power profiling is done on function level, letting the developer know how much power is consumed during the execution of each function, and what the average current is during its execution. The power profiling utility provides insight to where efforts should be done to optimize for lower power consumption.
IAR Systems has pioneered power debugging functionality for microcontroller software development tools, and continues to innovate tools for the fast growing low-power segment of the embedded industry.
A free 30-days evaluation version can be found at www.iar.com/ewarm
Power debugging is available now for development on ARM Cortex cores.
Quotes from leading microcontroller partners:
“The optimization of power consumption is an issue that concerns all types of systems, not just battery operated ones. In low-power operation modes where the processor is stopped, the consumption is directly linked to the hardware implementation. In active mode the power consumption efficiency is dependent on both hardware and software. IAR Systems’ power debugger is a valuable tool that enables the customer to achieve aggressive power targets,” comments Jacko Wilbrink, ARM Product Marketing Director at Atmel.
“With NXP’s focus on low-power silicon process and design techniques rapidly bringing down the power consumption of our 32-bit LPC microcontrollers, it’s great to see IAR Embedded Workbench become power-aware.” said Geoff Lees, vice president and general manager, microcontroller product line, NXP Semiconductors. “This now enables embedded designers to more easily profile their application power usage down to the function level, make interactive power and performance tradeoffs in an intuitive way, and meet ever tighter power budgets”
“The launch of power debugging matches perfectly the introduction of the STM32 Ultra Low Power family, STM32L. With such a powerful tool, designers will easily fine tune their code to optimize performance, functionality and battery life of their applications in markets such as consumer, industrial, medical or metering”, said Dominique Jugnon, STMicroelectronics Development Tools Manager”.
“IAR Systems reinforces its position as one of the leading industry innovators with this power debugging approach to embedded development, benefitting embedded developers with insight into their application’s power consumption,” said Wendell Smith, manager of marketing and applications for Stellaris® ARM® Cortex(TM)-M3-based microcontrollers at Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI). “TI’s Stellaris family of microcontroller devices are ideally suited to low-power developments across a broad range of applications, and together with the power debugging tools incorporated in IAR Embedded Workbench, designers will now be able to optimize their code to achieve the lowest power consumption possible.”
The current release of power debugging tools supports the EFM32 Gecko development kits from Energy Micro. The onboard Advanced Energy Monitoring (AEM) of these kits simplifies and enhances the functionality of the IAR power debugger tools. Energy Micro CTO Øyvind Janbu commented, “As energy awareness is definitively an important aspect of code creation it is equally important that the development tools are able to reduce the debug and optimization efforts necessary. Energy Micro and IAR Systems worked together to bring designers the best software and hardware tools for energy efficient and low power applications.”
