We are proud to announce that the first update to Arm Development Studio is now available. This 2019.0 version builds upon the first 2018.0 release, offering further support for the latest Arm IP and technologies. Development Studio is Arm's flagship tool chain, addressing the needs of developers no matter where they are in the development cycle, from early system architecture investigation to final performance optimization.
Development Studio supports software packs provided by Arm and other vendors, giving out of the box support for over 6000 devices. Development Studio enables the MDK μVision IDE for convenience, though it is easy to migrate existing DS-5 and Keil MDK projects to the latest environment.
We have also looked to improve user productivity overall, adding support for the latest debug hardware that we offer, and out-of-the-box support for more and more standard devices, from relatively simple microcontrollers to advanced heterogeneous devices.
Being the tool chain from Arm, Development Studio is the first to support the latest Arm IP.
Support is in the form of build tools - compiler and assembler can generate appropriate instructions to get the best performance, and the debug tools can connect to platforms containing those CPUs, whether they be virtual platforms, built with Fast Models or Cycle Models, or physical hardware, be it an emulator, an FPGA, or final silicon.
Speaking of the compiler, we have updated the package to include the latest 6.12 release. My colleague Peterson writes in more detail on specific improvements this release offers in his blog 'Arm Compiler 6.12: Bringing in Security and Performance'. We understand that you may need to use a specific compiler version for your project. Silver and higher editions of Development Studio do support these legacy compiler releases with the Gold edition also supporting the safety qualified version. Read more about setting up your installation to use specific compiler versions.
Debug capabilities have been extended too, with support for the DSTREAM-PT debug and trace unit. This second generation unit is the highest performance probe Arm has ever created, offering fast debug and high bandwidth trace (up to 32-bit wide trace port) to users, enabling ever more thorough analysis of the execution of multi-core devices. This trace can also be loaded to the Streamline performance analyzer to visualize the code execution. For more information, see our blog 'Enhanced debug and analysis: introducing DSTREAM-PT parallel trace debug probe'.
Other debug probes in the DSTREAM and ULINK families are of course still supported.
All supplied debug configurations have been updated to include DSTREAM-PT support automatically. Furthermore new configurations were provided to support new devices, such as the STM32MP1 platform from STMicroelectronics, a heterogeneous device containing both Cortex-A7 and Cortex-M4 CPUs.
Support for the latest debug IP is also provided. CoreSight SoC-600 introduces the next-generation debug and trace technology from Arm, enabling developers to implement debug interfaces over and beyond the traditional JTAG and serial wire interfaces. Arm provides a standardized transport protocol that is agnostic of the physical link, called the CoreSight Wire Protocol (CSWP). Development Studio 2019.0 enables connections to target systems that implement CSWP protocol within the functional IO drivers and on-target debug agents, thereby enabling systems to be created that can debug over interfaces such as USB or PCIe. Information on CSWP, including host and target reference examples implementations, are freely accessible at Arm GitHub. Watch out for further blogs explaining this solution coming soon.
Graphics developers can also benefit from the features within Development Studio. The Graphics Debugger gives you frame-by-frame analysis of your Android applications. If the device contains a Mali GPU, then you can also use Streamline to visualize the entire system performance.
Development Studio 2019.0 is available to download now. Product functionality will be defined by your license. There is also a fully featured 30-day evaluation license available to allow new users to try it out. If you have not used Development Studio yet, please see this Developer article to help you get started. A free online webinar is available to introduce the key features and see the tool in action.
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