Development tool shortens build times for AMR-based devices

The ARM Cortex-M7 processor is the most recent addition to the ARM Cortex-M family. The processor is focused on energy efficiency and high performance and is intended for use in a wide variety of applications including for example automotive, industrial automation, medical devices and the IoT. The new version of IAR Embedded Workbench adds device support for ARM Cortex-M7 devices from Atmel and STMicroelectronics, including support for the double precision floating point unit. The support covers the Atmel | SMART MCUs ATSAMx70. From STMicroelectronics, the STM32F756 devices are now supported. In addition to these ARM Cortex-M7 MCUs, support for a number of ARM Cortex-based devices from several other vendors has been added.

In order to speed up build times, version 7.40 introduces parallel build. The user can easily set the compiler to run in several parallel processes and make better use of the available processor cores in the PC. This feature can have a major impact on reducing the build times of the compiler.

The add-on product, C-STAT, for powerful, integrated static code analysis, is now available. Static analysis finds potential issues in code on the source code level and can be used to prevent errors such as memory leaks, access violations, arithmetic errors and array and string overruns. The analysis performed by C-STAT improves code quality and aids alignment with industry coding standards. The tool checks compliance with rules as defined by MISRA C:2004, MISRA C++:2008 and MISRA C:2012, as well as hundreds of rules based on for example CWE and CERT C/C++. Users can easily select the rule set or individual rules to check their code against, and the analysis results are provided directly in the IAR Embedded Workbench IDE.