Tool suite verifies constrained, low-power embedded applications

With many systems now being connected, companies must enforce high-quality code, fully test and verify systems, and proactively prevent application vulnerabilities.  

Achieving in-depth analysis on a highly constrained microcontroller is not easy. Verification tools can exceed the bandwidth and memory resources of such microcontrollers, causing the analysis to crash or overload the system such that the target no longer functions as intended and system data becomes unreliable.  

LDRA has fine-tuned its instrumentation and analysis to low-power, highly constrained architectures to ensure that development teams can fully analyse and verify such systems to even the most rigorous levels demanded for safety-critical and security-critical certification. Using optimised technology, LDRA captures data from highly constrained target systems and sends it back to the host to help companies achieve coding standards compliance, safety standards compliance, and security standards compliance. This level of granular analysis is available not only on LDRA’s stand-alone products, LDRAunit and LDRAcover, but also on the LDRA tool suite, helping to ensure that companies gain complete traceability over the entire life cycle of their application from requirements through verification and deployment.

Although Internet of Things (IoT) is capturing much of the media’s attention for its scaled-down, connected systems, other industries such as avionics, defense, industrial control, smart energy, medical, and automotive now also take advantage of new, highly functional, low-power controllers that have little tolerance for the overhead of most verification technologies and tools. LDRA recognizes that size, weight, and power are always a consideration and has developed different methods of connectivity between the host and the target to ensure that data can be pulled from even the smallest 8-bit and 16-bit microcontrollers provided by ARM, Freescale, Microchip, Renesas, and Texas Instruments. The tool suite is therefore capable of providing unprecedented end-to-end application and verification analysis on systems where granular expertise for microcontrollers is needed as well as robust, comprehensive analysis for multicore technologies.