Am2045 - aDesigner™ Tool Suite

aDesigner™ is a comprehensive, easy-to-use tool suite that uses Nethra's award-winning structured component programming model to make software development practical for embedded application developers who want to harness the power of massively parallel processors like the Am2045 massively parallel processor array (MPPA).

The aDesigner integrated development environment (IDE) has a powerful graphical user interface 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 and very familiar platform to accelerate developers' adoption and learning curve.

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 Am2045 MPPA. There are no intermediate results to be back-annotated and no language database to be stored: just straightforward software code executing on the hardware.

With aDesigner, development time is saved because hierarchical components can be created and then reused to easily build complex objects in software and on the Am2045 MPPA. Also, these objects can be encapsulated and replicated on the same MPPA as well as across multiple MPPAs. Executing these software components then becomes a simple task because timing characteristics of the components are self-contained and there is no global timing closure issue to deal with.Nethra's Ambric-architecture MPPAs offer the most scalable and easest-to-program embedded systems processing available. aDesigner enables the productivity. ing characteristics of the object are self-contained and there is no global timing closure issue to deal with.