News & Press

Santa Barbara, CA. August 5, 2002 -- Green Hills Software today announced enhanced emulation support for IBM's PowerPC 4xx family of processors, including the new 440GP and 405GPr. Green Hills Software's MULTI debugger, together with Agilent's E5904B family of Trace Port Analyzers, provide advanced monitoring and control facilities for such features as real-time trace, greatly enhancing the debug process.

"MULTI's intuitive GUI makes it easy to monitor and control program execution on IBM's PowerPC processors," said John Carbone, vice president of marketing at Green Hills. "When used with Agilent's high-speed Trace Port Analyzers (TPA), MULTI's advanced register and memory read/write, trace, single-step and processor control facilities give programmers unique visibility into PowerPC programs as they execute on the target system."

"The MULTI IDE makes it easy to take full advantage of our high-speed trace capture capabilities," said Ron Nersesian, vice president and general manager of Agilent's Design Validation Unit in Colorado Springs. "Together, MULTI and our trace Port Analyzers greatly simplify the development and debugging of sophisticated embedded PowerPC programs. These Trace Port Analyzers are based on Agilent's industry leading logic analyzer technology and provide an easy interface to the logic analyzer."

The PowerPC 440GP is a superscalar processor based on the PowerPC BookE architecture. Fabricated in 0.18-micron CMOS technology, the 440GP features a peak performance of 1,000 MIPS at 500 MHz. The 440GP also features large caches, a 128-bit, 4.2-Gbyte/sec on-chip CoreConnect bus, a1.1-Gbyte/sec PCI-X bridge, a 2.1-Gbyte/sec DDR SDRAM controller, and two Ethernet channels. The PowerPC 405GPr, also fabricated in IBM's 0.18-micron CMOS process, is a highly integrated embedded processor optimized for low-power applications. Consuming just 1.3W at 333 MHz, the 405 GPr features a 64-bit CoreConnect bus, PCI interface, SDRAM controller, and a Fast Ethernet controller.

The MULTI debugger, through Agilent's TPA, gives designers complete access to and control over embedded PowerPC 4xx processors. Hosted on a Unix or Windows system, the MULTI debugger connects to Agilent's TPA through an Ethernet interface. The probes, in turn, connect to the IBM PowerPC processor via the RISC Trace Status Port's mictor connector.

The MULTI debugger manages and controls the uploading and viewing of data from the PowerPC processors as they execute in real time, enabling the user to run, halt, and reset the processor, read/write the processor's registers and memory, single-step through code, and set breakpoints. MULTI also provides advanced trace capabilities that, when used with the E5904B TPA, enable it to acquire program flow information as the program executes without having to halt the processor. Then, within MULTI, this information is automatically correlated with the appropriate line(s) of source code, allowing the user to quickly jump between corresponding trace data and lines of program execution, visible in MULTI.

The MULTI debugger provides a memory map window and several windows for emulator trace control, including trigger specification and trace display. Through MULTI, users can search trace data, correlate function names and variable names with trace data, create trace displays for source lines or specific events, and monitor program flow. They can also set and store trigger points for trace data collection, configure the size of the trace buffer, and load/save trace data to disk for post mortem analysis or simulation.

MULTI can display timing information at the source or assembly level. All of the emulator specific debug windows can be accessed anywhere within MULTI.

MULTI also takes full advantage of the E5904B's high-speed emulation capability, which streamlines the debug process for large programs by enabling the debugger to download those programs to the target in seconds rather than minutes.