Today I’m very pleased to announce our latest toolchain, Arm Development Studio, to the wide software development community. Featuring both Arm and Keil industry-leading tools, the new embedded development tool suite has been designed to increase product as well as engineering efficiency. When adopted alongside hardware-software co-design methodology, Development Studio can help companies take products to market as much as 6-12 months earlier compared to those using serialized hardware-software projects with non-commercial development tools.
The challenges faced by developers from the SoC design through to the software deployment are not new, but they are certainly getting more complex. Developers are under constant pressure to do more with less, while design complexity is increasing as more cores deliver more compute power. At the same time, developers must consider other key metrics like power consumption or, increasingly, the critical demands of safety and ever-present threats to the security integrity of devices.
IBS estimates that up to 40% of development costs in advanced IC design are software development costs and these are growing exponentially as the industry transitions to smaller nodes. If you look at the automotive industry as an example, you’ll see, vehicles trying to reach any level of autonomy need triple the number of source code lines than vehicles developed only 10 years ago, in order to obtain the required level of functionality and safety.
Carefully investing in professional toolchains is one way to ensure that embedded software engineers have the right tools delivering a quick return on investment. Good tools help developers focus on their primary role of producing good products, rather than wasting time on trying to work with unstable or poorly supported tools.
Our new product builds on the success of DS-5, which has been used to develop billions of shipped products worldwide, and also brings the microcontroller capabilities of our hugely successful MCU toolchain Keil MDK. Used internally by Arm for our own architecture validation, it offers the assurance of earliest and most comprehensive support for new Arm hardware IP - critical for those developers at the forefront of innovation.
Developers using Development Studio will see a new simplified user interface, a new target connection wizard and for the first time, a full set of software packs including CMSIS, middleware, and RTOS in the Development Studio IDE. Software packs enable engineers to shift their efforts from low-level software layers onto the value-add application code, enhancing engineering efficiency and time to market.
* Compared to version 6.6 on Cortex-M33
Learn more about the new features by signing up to our upcoming introduction webinar.
Three editions are currently available: Bronze, Silver and Gold. You can see a summary of the features in each edition in the below table:
Armv8-A “selected cores” indicates an evolving set of mass-market processors for this architecture, starting in the initial release with support for the Cortex-A53.
Of course, the product features are only half the story. When you buy a professional toolchain from Arm you are also getting full support from the experts. Why not take today a free 30-day trial of Development Studio featuring Keil MDK.
Try Development Studio free for 30 days