New code analysis possibilities for AVR developers

Version 6.60 of IAR Embedded Workbench for AVR adds support for IAR Systems’ static analysis add-on product C-STAT. Completely integrated in the IAR Embedded Workbench IDE, C-STAT can perform numerous checks for compliance with rules as defined by the coding standards MISRA C:2004, MISRA C++:2008 and MISRA C:2012, as well as rules based on, for example, CWE and CERT C/C++. By using static analysis, developers can identify errors such as memory leaks, access violations, arithmetic errors and array and string overruns at an early stage to ensure code quality and minimize the impact of errors on the finished product and on the project timeline.

In addition, stack usage analysis is introduced. As the stack is a fundamental property of an embedded application, setting it up properly is essential for ensuring the application’s stability and reliability. However, calculating the stack space is notoriously hard for all but the smallest of systems. This challenging task can be greatly simplified by having access to information about the worst case maximum stack depth of the application. Enabling stack usage analysis in IAR Embedded Workbench provides just that, adding listings of the maximum stack depth for each call graph root to the linker map file. The analysis process can be customised to take into account such constructs as calls via function pointers and recursion.

”The new functionality in IAR Embedded Workbench provides great advantages for our customers,” says Steve Pancoast, Vice President, SW Development, Tools & Applications, Atmel. “Developers can leverage the new analysis possibilities to improve the quality of their code, as well as streamline their development process. Atmel’s strong partnership with IAR Systems gives our customers access to world-leading tools across our entire range of AVR and Atmel | SMART ARM-based MCUs and MPUs.”

IAR Embedded Workbench for AVR is a complete set of high-performance C/C++ development tools featuring world-leading code optimisations creating compact, fast performing code. Version 6.60 introduces parallel build, which can have a major impact on speeding up build times. The user can optionally set the compiler to run in several parallel processes, which can significantly reduce the build times of the compiler.