IAR Systems and SEGGER announce flash breakpoints functionality in IAR embedded workbench for ARM
(Technology News, 12 Mar 2008 )
IAR Systems and SEGGER Microcontroller, leading manufacturers of software packages for embedded systems, have announced the availability of ‘Flash Breakpoints’ integrated into IAR Embedded Workbench for ARM.
There is a strong market for ARM7- and ARM9-based microcontrollers with embedded Flash, and IAR Systems and Segger share a mission to provide the best tools for all these customers. The most important parameters of a debug session are arguably the breakpoints, which are used to halt program execution at a predetermined location. The ARM7/9 architecture provides only two so-called hardware breakpoints, which is a severe limitation if debugging is performed in embedded Flash memory. One hardware breakpoint is often reserved for debugger functionality, leaving only a single breakpoint available to the programmer. However even an HLL instruction step over an IF construct requires two available breakpoints in Flash. With Flash Breakpoints (FlashBP) this limitation no longer exists. The high performance algorithm used in the implementation of FlashBPs ensures that delays are hardly noticeable compared to debugging in RAM. FlashBPs are available for most of the popular ARM7/9 embedded Flash microcontrollers.
