Advanced software development tools support for RISC-V

The MULTI integrated development environment, multicore debugger, optimising C/C++ compilers and hardware JTAG probe is the professional, high-quality complete solution for software developers targeting pre-silicon and silicon platforms using RISC-V.

Customers are using the Green Hills solution for RISC-V to achieve shorter development times, higher processor performance, and to gain competitive differentiation through the RISC-V’s custom instructions and modular instruction set architecture.

Thousands of successful customers trust Green Hills Software's development tools to build, debug, and deploy critical, high performance systems for automotive, defence, medical, transportation, storage and industrial applications. Green Hills brings a unique pedigree to RISC-V, having delivered optimising compilers for 37 processor architectures since 1982, including Arm, Intel Architecture, Power Architecture, MIPS, RH850 and TriCore to name a few.

“We welcome Green Hills Software into the MI-V RISC-V ecosystem and look forward to collaborating with them to allow our mutual customers to deliver market-leading solutions in shorter periods of time,” said Shakeel Peera, Associate Vice President of the Field Programmable Gate Array business unit at Microchip. “PolarFire SoC FPGAs deliver world-class, low-power computing with market-leading security and reliability that will be even easier to implement when coupled with the Green Hills MULTI development environment.”

“Green Hills development tools are known in the embedded industry for professional quality and proven performance,” said Rob Oshana, Chairman of the openHW Board of Directors, Board Member of RISC-V International Board of Directors, and VP of Software Engineering R&D at NXP Semiconductors. “A key factor for the sustained success of RISC-V depends on trusted global software industry leaders like Green Hills, and I’m very pleased to see them add RISC-V to their portfolio.”

“We’re pleased to welcome Green Hills Software to the RISC-V ecosystem, offering support for innovators in the safety-critical and reliability fields,” said Dr Yunsup Lee, CTO, SiFive. “SiFive’s mission of Idea-to-Silicon is enabled by robust, comprehensive software platforms from partners, such as Green Hills Software, developing support for SiFive processors.”

The Green Hills software development tools support both 32-bit and 64-bit RISC-V architectures and provide for the Integer, Multiply/Divide, Atomic, Compressed, and Single- and Double-Precision Floating Point modules. Importantly, users can add their own custom RISC-V instructions and easily use them in the Green Hills compiler, assembler, MULTI debugger, and instruction set simulator. RISC-V’s separate privileged instruction set specification is also supported.

Green Hills Compilers support ISO/IEC 14882:2011 (C++11), ISO/IEC 14882:2014 (C++14) and ISO/IEC 14882:2017 (C++17) which offers a number of new language features and standard libraries. In addition to this support, the Green Hills Compilers also support Embedded C++ and GNU C/C++ extensions.

The MULTI toolchain has been certified to meet the highest levels of tools qualification and C/C++ runtime certification for automotive, industrial and railway applications (ISO 26262, IEC 61508, EN 50128). Certification support and evidence for MULTI and the C/C++ run-time libraries for RISC-V will be available in CY2021 to enable customers’ FuSa production program requirements.

To help prevent new software bugs in RISC-V applications, an integrated MISRA C/C++ Adherence Checker for MISRA 2004 and MISRA 2012 is seamlessly integrated in the MULTI development tools, while the DoubleCheck static source analyser identifies programming errors. Unlike traditional static analysis tools that run separately from the compiler, DoubleCheck automatically runs during compilation. The Run-Time Error Checking tool complements DoubleCheck by finding bugs at run-time that cannot be identified by static analysis alone.

The MULTI development tools can quickly identify and solve other difficult problems during software development on RISC-V and other leading 32- and 64-bit processor architectures. Some popular features include:  

• The MULTI debugger and JTAG Probe bring single-window debugging and control on complex heterogenous system-on-chips (SoC) comprised of one or more RISC-V cores with other cores such as Arm.
• The powerful Profiler pinpoints performance bottlenecks by clearly displaying processor times consumed by each task, function, source line, and assembly language instruction.

The MULTI development tools, optimising C/C++ compilers and Green Hills Probe for RISC-V are available now.