IAR Embedded Workbench supports 64-bit Arm cores

In the embedded industry, more and more applications are being based on 64-bit cores, specifically within low-power applications, deeply embedded and handheld devices. In these application areas, IAR Embedded Workbench has a strong foothold and is the toolchain of choice for many companies to reach maximum performance and energy efficiency.

By supporting leading-edge designs needing the performance from 64-bit Arm cores, IAR Systems now enables its customers to make use of the toolchain’s leading optimisation technology also for 64-bit devices. In addition, integrated code analysis tools ensure code quality, and for simplified functional safety certification, a pre-certified version of the toolchain is available.

Complementing the highly optimising build tools, IAR Embedded Workbench for Arm offers extensive debugging and analysis possibilities such as complex code and data breakpoints, runtime stack analysis, call stack visualisation, code coverage analysis and integrated monitoring of power consumption. The company’s I-jet debugging probes and the high-performance C-SPY Debugger 64-bit instruction set simulator offer further capabilities for seamless and flexible development workflows.

The toolchain enables multicore debugging of combined Cortex-A (32/64-bit), Cortex-R (32-bit) and Cortex-M (32-bit) devices and System-On-Chips (SoCs). IAR Embedded Workbench for Arm also provides pre-integrated software solutions from leading real-time operating systems (RTOS) and middleware vendors.

“Starting in the 8-bit world, we have been following our customers into 32-bit, and we are now continuing the journey together into the 64-bit world,” said Stefan Skarin, CEO, IAR Systems. “Our customers need to have access to integrated, flexible solutions that provide advanced functionality without compromising performance or quality, and we are working with a number of lead customers who are early adopters of 64-bit devices in order to make their technology switch as smooth and efficient as possible, and enable them to develop next-generation embedded applications.

“Through this extended offering, we are building a development tools platform for the future, enabling our customers to both maximise their already made investments as well as prepare for innovations yet to come.”

The latest version of IAR Embedded Workbench for Arm delivers support for a number of different 64-bit processors, such as the NXP i.MX 8 series of application processors including the i.MX 8M, i.MX 8M Mini and i.MX 8M Nano products.   “The support of 64-bit in IAR Embedded Workbench for Arm is great news for developers wanting to implement real-time applications on higher performance embedded processors,” added Robert Thompson, Director of i.MX Ecosystem, NXP Semiconductors. “NXP's i.MX 8M applications processors provide cost-effective integration and affordable performance for smart, connected, power-efficient devices requiring graphics, vision, voice control, machine learning, intelligent sensing and general-purpose processing. IAR Systems and NXP’s long history of collaboration in the embedded processing space enables our combined technologies to provide a powerful development platform for 64-bit embedded applications.”

With version 9.10, the toolchain supports the Armv8-A execution model AArch64 and the Arm AArch-64 data models ILP32 and LP64, and is compatible with the Arm AEABI 64-bit and the C++ IA64 ABI and C++ IA64 exceptions ABI.