Name: Benefits of ARM Keil MDK
Uploaded: 2017-05-26T08:43:48.000Z
Duration: 16 min 36 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Hello and welcome to the webinar “Benefits of MDK”.

My name is Jürgen Langfeld and I work for element14 as a technical advisor in Munich.

I’m here with Christopher Seidl from ARM who will tell us more about the benefits of MDK compared to free tools

that are out there in the market. Hello, Christopher!

Hi Jürgen! Thanks for inviting me today!

Let me quickly introduce element14. Farnell Element14 is a high-service distributor of technology products

and solutions for electronic system design, maintenance and repair in Europe, America and Asia Pacific.

As a digital enterprise, we bring together the latest products, services and development software,

all connected to an industry leading online engineering community, ELEMENT14.

Through our community, purchasers and engineers can access peers and experts, a wide range of independent

technical information and proprietary tools.

Our multi-channel focus ensures we can meet the varying needs of customers and includes an extensive

global network of transactional websites and more traditional sales channels.

To keep pace with changing technology, our engineers actively identify

and source innovative niche manufacturers providing choice and competitive advantage

for today’s most in-demand application areas,

supported by a global supply chain and an inventory profile in which we invest and develop.

Well, whether researching a new technology, designing an electronic product, or looking for parts to repair an existing system,

Farnell Element14 is the trusted global source for engineering solutions.

Christopher, as element14 has many different silicon vendors on the line card, how many devices are you supporting with MDK?

Currently, we support over 3750 devices from all major silicon vendors.

That’s impressive! Tell me more about MDK! The Keil MDK microcontroller development kit consists of MDK-Core,

which is made up of the µVision IDE and debugger.

The µVision IDE combines project management, run-time environment, build facilities, source code editing,

and program debugging in a single powerful environment.

µVision is easy-to-use and accelerates your embedded software development.

The µVision Debugger provides a single environment in which you may test, verify, and optimize your application code.

The debugger includes traditional features like simple and complex breakpoints, watch windows,

and execution control and provides full visibility to device peripherals.

It also contains advanced capabilities such as the component viewer and the event recorder,

as well as full instruction trace using when using our ULINKpro debug and trace adapter.

Software Packs add device support and software components that you can use as building blocks for your application.

These software components are provided by ARM, silicon vendors and middleware companies.

CMSIS, the Cortex Microcontroller Software Interface Standard, is provided as a software pack itself.

It is a vendor independent collection of API definitions, libraries, utilities, and methods that simplify

and accelerate the creation of microcontroller applications.

CMSIS is provided free-of-charge by ARM and its software components can be used in any open source and commercial projects.

Software programmers benefit from RTOS, DSP-Libraries, consistent access to core peripherals, and enhanced debug visibility.

Which compiler are you using under the hood?

MDK is using the ARM Compiler which is considered as the reference compiler for the ARM architecture.

It provides very efficient code and has excellent optimization options, which can be easily configured from within µVision.

You can also make use of Microlib, a set of libraries that have been highly optimized for use on the Cortex-M architecture.

It is possible to achieve reductions in flash footprint of up to 40% compared to the standard libraries when using Microlib.

Many of our customers require a compiler that they can use for functional safety applications. Do you have a certified compiler available?

MDK offers two versions of the ARM compiler: The proven ARM Compiler 5 which is certified for by TÜV for functional safety applications

offering and which offers long term support and maintenance.

The new ARM Compiler 6 is based on the LLVM compiler technology and offers superior codes size and performance.

It also adds support for the latest C++ standards, such as C++11 and C++14.

I am often asked for middleware from our customers to accelerate their development. What do you offer here?

Our MDK Middleware provides royalty-free, tightly-coupled software components that are specifically designed for

communication peripherals in microcontrollers. It supports TCP/IP networking with both, IPv4 and IPv6, USB host and device,

and a file system component that lets you work with files in storage devices such as RAM, Flash, various memory cards,

The graphics component enables you to develop flexible graphical user interfaces for LCD displays,

while the mbed software components enable IoT applications. mbed TLS provides secure communication using SSL/TLS,

whereas mbed Client connects your device to an mbed Device Server.

MDK Middleware is provided as part of the MDK-Professional or MDK-Plus editions in binary format.

I see that you have two IDEs. You have already talked about the µVision IDE. What is DS-MDK?

DS-MDK combines the Eclipse-based DS-5 IDE and debugger with CMSIS-Pack technology and uses software packs to extend device support

for devices based on 32-bit ARM Cortex-A processors or heterogeneous systems based on 32-bit ARM Cortex-A

Heterogeneous devices combine the best of both worlds.

This means that you can run a sophisticated Linux application on the Cortex-A core and have a real-time application

running on the Cortex-M core. DS-MDK is part of MDK-Professional.

Can you tell me more about CMSIS as a standard? All silicon vendors are supporting this, right?

How can our customers benefit from CMSIS?

CMSIS is widely adopted in the industry and offers a unified feature set when talking about system startup, processor core access,

and peripheral definitions. CMSIS-CORE makes it easy to get started with a new device or to migrate software across microcontrollers.

CMSIS-RTOS is an API that enables consistent software layers with middleware and library components.

Our reference implementation CMSIS-RTOS RTX runs on every Cortex-M device and is easy to learn and use.

And we are working on a version of the popular FreeRTOS using the CMSIS-RTOS API. This should be available quite soon.

Interfacing microcontroller peripherals with middleware or generic application code can be challenging as each device is different.

Ready-to use CMSIS-Driver interfaces are today available for many microcontroller families and avoid cumbersome

Developing a real-time digital signal processing (DSP) system is not trivial as the DSP algorithms heavily rely on

complex mathematical operations that are even time-critical.

The CMSIS-DSP library is a rich collection of DSP functions that are optimized by ARM for the various Cortex-M processor cores.

CMSIS-Pack describes a delivery mechanism for software components, device parameters, and evaluation board support.

Users can benefit from code templates that help them to get started quickly.

That all sounds very nice, but most of our customers are using the toolchains they get freely from their silicon vendor.

How do you compete with these freely available tools?

That is a valid question. Let me show you for example the superior compiler performance using an example project:

I have here a demo project for the LPCXpresso 5411x development platform.

It is using CMSIS-RTOS RTX5 and is compiled with gcc, using the LPCXpresso IDE.

The resulting code size with gcc is 10.3 KB and 2.9 KB RAM. Now, let’s switch to MDK and use ARM Compiler 5 to build the project.

We can see that for these memory constrained devices, the code size is better, only 9.6 KB ROM and 2.6 KB RAM

This means that you get more functionality into your chip.

Great! Our customers are often concerned about code size.

They always look for the smallest device that they can use in their projects due to price restrictions.

We can even reduce the code size! ARM Compiler 6 offers the smallest code size that you can get.

As I said this is the latest compiler from ARM that is available with MDK. Now let’s take a look at the results.

They are much better, only 7 KB ROM and 2.2 KB RAM. This means that you get more code into the same device.

This can save a lot of money when going to mass production and justifies paying a little extra on the development tool!

That is really impressive, but I’m not yet convinced. What else do you have in stock?

I have briefly told you about our superior debug capabilities. Let’s take a look at another example:

I have here a web server application running on an STM32F7 discovery board.

This application is using our middleware for setting up the web server and the TCP/IP communication using IPv4 and IPv6.

Often, embedded devices are headless, which means that you do not have a display to show you information of what’s going on.

This can be tricky especially for networking applications, when you don’t know if your device has received an IP address or not.

This is no problem when using the component viewer that gives you access to variables and structures of software components.

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Benefits of ARM Keil MDK

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