TASKING's Enhanced CrossView Pro Delivers Powerful Debugging and Shorter Development Time

Graphical Data Analysis and Enhanced Register Windows Quickly Identify Errors

Dedham, MA. — May 23, 2000 — TASKING, The Embedded Communications Company, today announced several enhancements to its CrossView Pro debugger that significantly ease the difficulty of debugging, reducing overall development time. Through a more intuitive graphical user interface, CrossView Pro equips developers with superior visual feedback and control. For quick error detection of the signal input, TASKING's graphical signal performance analysis reduces large sets of data into meaningful visual diagrams. Enhanced register windows speed the detection of errors by enabling developers to group registers into meaningful sets, identify problems and remove performance bottlenecks. This additional functionality boosts developer efficiency, giving them the resources they need to produce a high-quality product and reduce time to market.

"Due to the increased complexity of applications, customers are spending an increasing amount of time in the debug phase of their software development," says Clarke Esler, Strategic Marketing Manager for TASKING. "These additions to CrossView Pro keep that time to a minimum and make the debug phase as productive as possible."

Recognizing the need for developers to respond efficiently to more complex tasks, CrossView Pro offers immediate graphical feedback. Through graphical data analysis, developers can analyze data using pre- and user-defined specifications and display it in five formats: x-t plotting, x-y plotting, FFT power spectrum, FFT waterfall and Eye diagram. With the enhanced register windows, developers group and display registers in sets, such as general purpose, floating point or UART, which can be saved between debug sessions. Through symbolic editing, the developer can enter a register value by specifying the meaning of the register's bits and configuring the SFRs. Memory windows highlight memory locations, where the content has changed. Through these visual improvements, developers gain the most powerful and simple solutions for addressing complex debugging needs.

In addition to these graphical enhancements, CrossView Pro provides developers with on-chip debug support (OCDS). Through the OCDS interface, developers gain full control of a chip's memory, registers and run-time behavior and are able to test the interrupt response behavior of their program and identify performance issues with additional breakpoint capabilities. Determined to maximize developer efficiency, TASKING enables developers to activate and disable complex breakpoints with a simple mouse click.

Using BubbleSpy technology, developers can display variable or function values in a popup box activated by mouse-point positioning. The value of a variable or function is then displayed in a popup box. Additional graphical improvements include flat toolbar buttons, clipboard support, window and dialog capabilities, which conform to the desktop setup, and new cut/paste functions for windows and data entry fields.

Availability
The new CrossView Pro core available now for the TASKING Toolsets. Existing CrossView Pro customers with a maintenance contract may upgrade to this release free of charge. A demo version of CrossView Pro is available from the products area of TASKING's web site www.tasking.com/products, while the release notes and readme files can be downloaded from the technical support area www.tasking.com/support.

About TASKING
TASKING, the Embedded Communications Company, brings together the software technology needed to compete in the embedded communications era. TASKING's award-winning integrated development environment, compiler, debugger, embedded Internet and RTOS offerings support a wide range of DSPs and 8-, 16- and 32-bit microprocessors and microcontrollers for all areas of embedded communications. TASKING, founded in 1974, is a privately held company with headquarters in Dedham, Massachusetts, and engineering, sales and support offices in San Jose, California, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Japan and the UK. TASKING's 100,000 licensed users includes the world's leading telecom, datacom, wireless and peripheral manufacturers. More information about TASKING can be found at www.embeddedcommunications.com and www.tasking.com

TASKING, the TASKING logo, The Embedded Communications Company and BubbleSpy are trademarks of TASKING. All other trademarks and logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.