We have been very busy over the last six months working hard on our new tools. One of the big things that we have been working on is trying to make the tools much easier to use. Internally we had a project that we called “Arkanoid”, which was something that we had been playing with and working on for some time. (Like many of our project names Arkanoid was named after the classic arcade game) Arkanoid had a number of different goals but the key things was to provide an easy way for you to select different IP blocks and interfaces and try them on an xCORE multicore device.
As our library of xSOFTip components was growing fast and we were putting more and more effort into getting new xSOFTip blocks built, it became obvious that we needed to have an easy way for you to try these out.
So as we were finished off on the LLVM compiler work (full story in a later blog post) we set to work turning Arkanoid into a application that we could build into our new tools suite. The concept is pretty simple:
- one window has the list of xSOFTip components that you can select
- another window shows you what is in the xSOFTip component that you have clicked on
- you then drag the component into your system build window and add it alongside other components that you need to build your system
- you can add in 32bit processor cores and DSP’s too
- at the bottom you get a read out on how many resources you have used and which might be a sensible device for your design
We also decide to bundle this up as a stand-alone tool so that first time users could try out our technology without having to write any code and we decide to call this xSOFTip Explorer.
We aim to keep working on xSOFTip Explorer and to turn this into a web-tool that you can drive directly from our website, making it even easier to try our technology out.
We are also thinking about ways in which we can make it easier for you to stitch together different xSOFTip components to build up your system. The technology behind this is actually pretty complicated so give us a little time with this.
Please give us your feedback on the xSOFTip Explorer and tell us what we can do to make improvements. We look forward to hearing from you.