Design to test speeds with debugger

Green Hills has announced that Mobileye has used its TimeMachine 4-D debugger, optimising compilers and hardware probes to speed design, implementation and testing of a single-chip vision system.

Green Hills Software has announced that Mobileye, a leading provider of automated driver assistance technologies, has used Green Hills Software's Multi integrated development environment, TimeMachine 4-D debugger, optimising compilers and hardware probes to speed the design, implementation and testing of a single-chip vision system.

Combining high performance with low cost, Mobileye's EyeQ IC is a complete vision system-on-a-chip (SoC) that is set to revolutionise the mass implementation of camera-based driver assistance systems.

Mobileye is using Green Hills Software's Multi development environment, TimeMachine debugger and compilers for compiling, optimising, debugging and analysing the proprietary Mobileye vision software code embedded into the new EyeQ SoC.

The company also uses the MULTI tools and Green Hills Software's probes, including the high-capacity SuperTrace probe, to manage the tests of EyeQ's two ARM9E embedded CPUs during both design and production.

Key reasons cited by Mobileye for choosing the Green Hills Software tools include stability, ease of use, excellent code optimisation, and the ability to run on both Windows and Linux platforms.

The TimeMachine debugger and Multi development environment support the ARM processor's embedded trace buffers (ETBs) and embedded trace module (ETM) and multi-processor debug was also particularly important as the EyeQ SoC integrates two ARM946E processors and an ETM/ETB.

Discussing the choice of the Green Hills Software toolchain, Mr Elchanan Rushinek, Mobileye's vice president of engineering, comments: "We evaluated a number of tools and the Multi toolchain, TimeMachine Debugger and the Green Hills probes represented the closest match to our requirements.

Support for C++ and STL, the ability to perform multi-processor debug and debug backwards in time using TimeMachine, plus good code optimization were all important factors in the selection, as was the fact that the tools run on both Windows and Linux.

In addition, because the compilers, debuggers and the IDE are all intuitive, and because the tools are stable, using Multi helped us to reduce the time spent on design and prototyping, allowing us to minimize the time it took to bring EyeQ to market." He adds: "The support that we received from the Green Hills Software team from project inception and on through final testing and production ensured that we lost no time in identifying how to put the tools to work to ensure the most cost- and time-efficient project plan." EyeQ, Mobileye's ASIC implementation of its vision algorithms, is a complete vision SoC with the equivalent computing power (for this type of application) of two powerful Pentium computers at a fraction of the cost, power consumption and size.

EyeQ meets automotive cabin grade qualification requirements.

Agreements have already been signed with several manufacturers and Tier-1 suppliers for installation in production vehicles starting in 2007.

Green Hills Software's Multi environment provides a complete, integrated development solution for embedded applications using C, C++, Embedded C++ and Ada 95.

The Multi development environment runs on Windows, Linux, or UNIX hosts, and supports remote debugging to a variety of target environments.

The Multi development environment provides a direct graphical interface with all Green Hills compilers, and supports multi-language development and debugging.

The Multi development environment contains all of the tools needed to debug and deploy a major programming project including: source-level debugger, project builder, event analyzer, performance profiler, run-time error checker, and non-intrusive field debugging.

The TimeMachine debugger provides developers the ability to run and step an application back in time after a failure occurs, allowing easy identification of its root cause.

This avoids the tedious and open-ended process of trial-and-error debugging required by previous generations of temporally-challenged debuggers.

The TimeMachine debugger exploits the power of Green Hills Software's SuperTrace probe.

The SuperTrace probe features an exceptionally large 1Gbyte trace data storage capacity, and can operate with clock speeds in excess of 300MHz.

The probe allows users to collect hundreds of millions of trace frames and significantly reduces the time taken in identifying bugs in embedded code or testing finished code on the production line.

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