Newly released software minimises code size

12-08-2020 | Segger | Design & Manufacture

The newly released SEGGER Embedded Studio V5 for Arm processors is issued with the company’s Compiler, Linker, Runtime and Floating-Point libraries incorporated. All components are created from the ground up for employment in embedded systems and work seamlessly to assist in generating remarkably small programs.

A program which blinks an LED - a ‘blinky’ - on a typical Cortex-M microcontroller unit is able to be written in C or C++, with a complete size of less than 100bytes. Terminal output (printf) can be accomplished in real-time using RTT, SWO or semi-hosting with host-side formatting, retaining even the standard ‘Hello World’ program to just a few hundred bytes.

Like the company's SystemView and Ozone platforms, Embedded Studio can be employed on Windows, Linux and macOS operating systems.

“This new version of Embedded Studio is truly groundbreaking. I have never seen a toolchain that produces such small programs, especially out-of-the-box, created by the project generator. Our compiler uses Clang with a new code generator developed directly by the SEGGER software engineering team. In balanced optimisation mode, it produces code that is as small as it is fast. Our linker, startup code, runtime library and debugger are all tuned to get the most out of a microcontroller,” said Rolf Segger, founder of SEGGER. “Version 5 outperforms even my own expectations.”

Embedded Studio is available to download without registration and used free of charge for educational and non-commercial purposes, as well as evaluated (without code size, feature, or time limit) on all platforms.

By Natasha Shek