Altium Announces TASKING C Compiler for Power Architecture

Altium announced a new major release of its TASKING C compiler solution for automotive application development, supporting the Power Architecture  based microcontrollers from the Freescale Qorivva/5xxx series and STMicroelectronics SPC5 series.

In addition to various improvements on code optimizations for speed and size, the new compiler brings device support for the MPC56xx and SPC56x microcontroller series, while also allowing users to develop applications already for new devices by selecting the corresponding e200 core level, the company says.

With this new release of its VX-toolset, Altium has brought its toolset under the Eclipse IDE, through a plug-in that enables integration of the compiler tools and the simulator user-interface into the Eclipse framework. The TASKING compiler plug-in enables customization and optimization of the build process by selecting the compiler chain options from a configuration explorer tree.

“TASKING customers enjoy excellent proven-in-use experiences with our C compilers and have requested support for the new Power Architecture automotive chips from Freescale (Qorivva/5xxx) and STMicroelectronics (SPC5),” said Harm-Andre Verhoef, TASKING Product Manager at Altium. “With this release, we are delivering to users of the latest Power Architecture compatibility with our popular VX-toolsets and the robust, efficient code generation customers can expect from TASKING.”

By using TASKING’s Viper technology, compatibility to other TASKING toolsets is guaranteed and migration of an application to and from other architectures is straightforward, the company says. In this new release, the Viper compiler is extended with caching functionality, which saves the compiler’s intermediate results in order to avoid full compilations.

The VX-toolset for Power Architecture release v2.1 is available now on PC/Windows, with other platforms supported on request.

For more information, visit Altium.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.