TRACE32® extends embOS awareness to RH850

Lauterbach, the manufacturer of microprocessor development tools, has announced that it has extended the kernel awareness for the embOS Real-time Operating System (RTOS) from SEGGER Microcontroller to the RH850 family of micro processors from Renesas. TRACE32, the class leading debug tools from Lauterbach, already supports embOS on ARM, PowerPC, RX, SH and NIOS-II families and this tried and tested technology has now been extended to include RH850.

The embOS awareness plugin for TRACE32 allows the developer to visualise RTOS resources and objects such as task lists, mailboxes, timers and semaphores. Developers are free to investigate interrupt routines, drivers and application code all from within the familiar environment of TRACE32. When the awareness is configured, extra features become available, for instance the setting of task aware breakpoints.

All members of the RH850 family provide dedicated counter registers which can be accessed non-intrusively by the TRACE32 debugger. These can be configured to display minimum, maximum and mean runtimes for a user marked block of code or the runtimes of various tasks in the embOS system.

If the target provides off-chip trace capabilities, TRACE32 can record processor cycles and can be configured to collect data on task switches. Using this information, a detailed analysis of the program history, including task switches, can be viewed.

All features of the TRACE32 awareness for embOS do not require any additional target configuration or any hooks or patches within the RTOS itself. The philosophy of TRACE32 is for the application to behave exactly the same in the debug environment as on the final product; only this way can 100% certainty of testing be achieved.

“The powerful TRACE32 debug tool is now complemented by embOS for RH850, the best in class RTOS on the marked. This will help the software engineers to code even more efficient applications as embOS has lowest latencies and extremely small footprint. It is another milestone of our partnership with Lauterbach”, says Til Stork, embOS Product Manager at SEGGER.

“Our continued partnership with embOS allows users of RH850 devices to take full advantage of class leading tools and RTOS to developer smarter and more efficient embedded systems. This can only be good for the embedded industry by enabling developers to choose the best combination of tools and RTOS for their projects” says Barry Lock, UK General Manager of Lauterbach.