picoChip's picoTools is a fully-integrated development environment for the picoArray which includes symbolic debugger, breakpointing with single-step operation, graphical views of design data, simulator and a powerful monitoring and display environment for in-system testing. picoChip also supply a Library of Example Designs and a range of Development platforms.

The combination of picoArray and picoTools has brought unprecedented productivity to picoChip's customers. Again and again customers have reported that they have completed Wireless DSP developments in a fraction of the time expected for conventional reprogrammable solutions.

picoTools

picoTools is a fully integrated tool-chain which includes:

• Compilers and linkers for ANSI C, picoAE Assembler and structural VHDL
• Design Browser schematic generator/viewer to navigate design structure and hierarchy
• Symbolic debugger which can monitor/breakpoint any part of the design
• Cycle-accurate Simulator
• "Place & Switch" tool – fully-automatic allocation of design functions to the available processing element and configuration of the picoBus inter-processor communications
• Emulation environment - uses the same source level debugger that was used for simulation, giving a seamless transition to the lab environment.

A demonstration of the tools (video, wmv format)

picoTools Customer Training

picoChip provides full training in the use of picoTools and the Development Platforms. Contact info@picochip.com for details of pricing and availability.

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picoTools hardware requirements

The tools require a PC or 100% compatible based on the Intel Pentium II or higher, with at least 300Mb of free disk space for installation. Their RAM and disk requirements in use are not onerous, but are proportional to the size of DSP system being processed. Spare disk space is required for files generated by the tools e.g. executables. Any examples of performance and resource usage given will be for a machine with one 1000MHz Pentium III processor, 256Mb of RAM and a 20Gb EIDE hard disk.

System software requirements

The development platform used is Linux RedHat Enterprise 3.0 or 4.0. When installing Linux, ensure that all the following packages are included:

• Kernel 2.4.3 or higher.
• Standard libraries glibc 2.2.2 or higher and glibc++ 3 or higher.
• C/C++ compiler - gcc/g++ 3.2.3.
• Tcl/Tk 8.3 or higher and its development environment.
• Acrobat Reader 4.0 or higher and a browser at least equivalent to Netscape 4.77 or Internet Explorer 5.
• X windows version XFree86 4.0.3 or higher.
• At least 10Mb of space in the standard system temporary directory /tmp for temporary files. It is also expected (and usual in all Linux systems) that this temporary directory is located on a local disk.

Specific libraries that are required from the above are libtk, libtcl, libXext and libX11 (which are automatically linked in when a simulation is produced).