Imagination shatters price barriers to SoC embedded software development

SoC designers need high-quality development environments to accommodate the vast amount of software required for ever-more complex designs. Chip vendors are also under increasing pressure to provide complete development solutions to their customers – often hundreds of users – to create software optimised for that specific silicon. A low-cost development environment is a must.

Steve Evans, VP of business operations for MIPS at Imagination, says: “We’re seeing a lot of demand for low-cost tools especially for IoT applications where our customers are facing a combination of constrained budgets, aggressive timelines, and large software teams requiring quality tools. The Codescape and Eclipse enabled Bus Blaster probes provide an ideal solution.

Since the software toolchain and debugger interfaces are developed and deployed by Imagination, customers can be confident that the tools will help them deliver high-quality products on time and on budget.”

MIPS licensees and their OEM customers now have access to a fully supported, powerful state-of-the-art toolchain and development tools for approximately $45 per development seat, an unheard of price point for this class of tools. The tools include:

• The Codescape Debugger and Codescape for Eclipse IDE: these rigorously tested tools are freely available and can be used with the ultra-low cost Bus Blaster JTAG probes. They provide the ‘front-end’ user debug interfaces to quickly be productive in editing, compiling, and debugging MIPS-based software applications.
• Bus Blaster JTAG debug probe: this economical, high-speed debug adapter supports all of the powerful features that MIPS licensees expect. Bus Blaster probes will be widely available from various worldwide distributors at an economical price to meet users’ needs from DIY to academia, to large corporate project teams.
• Codescape MIPS Essentials SDK: the optimised kit includes a complete GCC toolchain and provides the program compiling, building, and library tools and utilities; everything necessary to develop code for customers’ MIPS-based designs.

The Imagination University Programme (IUP) – including the popular MIPSfpga course and Connected MCU Lab – will make widespread use of the new tools. MIPSfpga provides a unique learning platform with a complete, modern MIPS RTL design that is ideal for learning the fundamentals of IoT System-on-Chip (SoC) development.

The new MIPS tools, in particular the Eclipse IDE and Codescape Debugger, complement the MIPSfpga program materials. The Eclipse enabled Bus Blaster will allow for a seamless integration between code generation and in-target testing and debug.

The tools will be available on May 3rd. Visit http://community.imgtec.com/developers/mips/tools for more information and to access the tools.