Am2045 - aDesigner™ Tool Suite

aDesigner™ is a comprehensive, easy-to-use tool suite that uses Ambric's award-winning structured object programming model (SOPM) to make software development practical for embedded application developers who need to harness the power of massively parallel processors like the Am2000 family of massively parallel processor arrays (MPPAs).

The aDesigner™ integrated development environment (IDE) has a powerful graphical user interface (GUI) that serves as a cockpit for the user to program the Am2000 MPPA. The design creation, simulation, compilation, realization and debugging tools, which are included in the tool suite, enable easy creation, verification, and real time execution of the objects that collectively form the complete design. The simulator provides cycle-accurate behavior of the design; the compiler has a unique optimization capability that takes into account user-defined constraints at both the local and global levels; the realization tool enables mapping of the design on single or multiple devices; and the debugger enables bugs to be detected during design simulation and design execution in the real-time hardware system. Together these tools work seamlessly within aDesigner™ and offer the developer a comprehensive environment. The aDesigner™ IDE uses the widely-deployed Eclipse framework, a mature, familiar platform to accelerate developers' migration.

The aDesigner™ suite enables a deterministic approach to programming because data transfer and execution control are combined into a single mechanism that eliminates global timing closure issues. It also provides a very practical approach by providing the ability to directly map software objects onto processors on the chip. What you see in software is what you get on the Am2000 MPPA. There are no intermediate results to be back annotated and no language database to be stored: just straightforward SOPM-based software code executing on the Am2000-based hardware.

With aDesigner™, development time is saved because hierarchical objects can be created and then reused to easily build complex objects in software and on the Am2000 MPPA. Also, these objects can be encapsulated and replicated on the same MPPA as well as across multiple MPPAs. Executing these objects then becomes a simple task because timing characteristics of the object are self-contained and there is no global timing closure issue to deal with.