Jonkoping, Sweden, 9th January 2013 – Atollic® today announced the availability of a new fault analysis feature for the Atollic TrueSTUDIO IDE when developing C/C++ projects for ARM Cortex-M3 or Cortex-M4 microcontrollers. Added to the debugger, the fault analyzer functions aid developers to identify and resolve hard-to-find system faults that occur when the CPU has been driven into a fault condition by the application software. The fault analyzer feature interprets information extracted from the Cortex-M nested vector interrupt controller (NVIC) in order to identify the reasons that caused the fault. Typically, this may include division by zero errors, accessing invalid memory locations or accessing memory locations on misaligned boundaries.
Within the debugger, after a fault has occurred, the code line where the fault happened will be displayed. The user can then view the reasons for the error condition. Faults are categorized broadly into bus, usage and memory faults. Bus faults occur when an invalid access attempt is made across the bus, either of a peripheral or memory location. Usage faults are the result of illegal instructions or other program errors. Memory errors can include attempts of access an illegal location or rule violations of the memory protection unit (MPU).
To further aid fault analysis, an exception stack frame visualization option provides a snapshot of MCU register values at the time of the crash. By isolating the fault to an individual instruction allows the developer to reconstruct the MCU to the condition they were at the time the faulty instruction was executed.
The fault analyzer feature within Atollic TrueSTUDIO’s debugger significantly aids embedded developers to quickly understand why the system has crashed thus improving productivity, speeding development time and quickening time to market.
Atollic TrueSTUDIO is a world-class development and debugging tool that offers a state-of-the-art editor, an optimizing C/C++ compiler and a multiprocessor-aware debugger with real-time tracing. The tool suite delivers a leap in software development team collaboration and developer productivity, and offers advanced features including ARM build and debug tools and Serial Wire Viewer (SWV) tracing. Also available to ARM developers are Atollic’s professional code-quality analysis and test-automation toolbox. Atollic TrueSTUDIO also includes static source code analysis with MISRA®-C compliance checking and code metrics features.
Complementing Atollic TrueSTUDIO are a family of code analysis and validation tools. Atollic TrueANALYZER® facilitates in-target test quality measurement using MC/DC-level coverage using dynamic execution flow analysis. Finally, Atollic TrueVERIFIER® provides an embedded test automation function using auto-generated and auto-executed unit test suites on the target board.
About Atollic TrueSTUDIO
Atollic® TrueSTUDIO® is the premier C/C++ development tool for professional ARM® developers, reducing time to market and increasing efficiency in your next embedded systems project. With Atollic TrueSTUDIO, you get a supremely powerful C/C++ compiler and debugger IDE, perfect for the most demanding of development projects!
Atollic TrueSTUDIO is based on one of the most widely used compilers in the world, thus providing proven and reliable code generation, compact code and high performance for ARM7™, ARM9™ and ARM Cortex™ projects. Atollic TrueSTUDIO conforms to open de-facto standards, such as the ECLIPSE™ IDE framework and the GNU toolchain, vastly reducing training and porting costs across teams and projects.
More information on Atollic TrueSTUDIO can be found here: http://www.atollic.com/index.php/truestudio
About Atollic
Atollic provides professional and highly integrated software development tools to the global embedded systems market. Atollic cooperates with many of the world’s largest semiconductor manufacturers and has many partners in related fields. The company’s products are distributed via an extensive international distributor network in over 30 countries. Atollic also offers expert software development services, primarily in the automotive, aerospace, defense, industrial and consumer markets. For more information on Atollic, please visit www.atollic.com.
