October 2000

• Complex hierarchical breakpoints

• Simulation of timers and UARTS

• Improved watch windows

• Tooltips on source variables

CAMBRIDGE, UK, October 24, 2000, Crossware (www.crossware.com), a leading embedded software tools developer, has announced new versions of its ColdFire debugging tools. These make it even easier to develop embedded software both with and without a target board. Enhancements include complex easy to use hierarchical breakpoints, simulation of timers and UARTs, improved watch windows and the extended use of ‘tooltips’.

The new debugging tools support complex hierarchical breakpoints that are created visually using drag-and-drop. A tree view displays the source level breakpoints and one breakpoint can be made dependent upon another simply by dragging the other breakpoint onto it. One breakpoint becomes the child of the other. A breakpoint can have multiple children and these can be combined using ‘and’ or ‘or’ logic so that the parent will not be triggered until all of its children have been triggered or until any one of its children has been triggered. Child breakpoints can have their own children and so it is possible to build extremely complex breakpoints with minimum effort. As each breakpoint is encountered by the executing program its ‘count’ is decremented and displayed. When the count reaches zero the breakpoint is triggered and its indicator changes from red to green. It is therefore easy to follow the progress of the breakpoint hierarchy as the breakpoints are encountered and triggered.

Simulation of the ColdFire on chip timers and UARTs allows programmers to carry out more of their software development using simulation. The state and progress of these devices can be viewed in a dialog box providing visual confirmation that the device is configured and running correctly. The simulating devices will also trigger the appropriate interrupts allowing programmers to test their interrupt handlers.

Watch windows display the values, location and type of C variables. These now support the editing of the values of any modifiable variable and support has also been added for assembler variables and assembler constants.

Tooltips allow the programmer to view the value of a variable simply by moving the mouse over it in a source window. If the mouse is stationary for more than half a second a small window pops up and displays its value, location and type.

Many of these enhancements will also appear in Crossware’s 8051 and 68000 debugging tools.

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