LDRA, TI to boost developer capabilities

WIRRAL, UK: LDRA, a provider of automated software verification, source code analysis, and test tools, on Thursday announced that it has integrated the LDRA tool suite with the Texas Instruments Code Composer Studio and Code Composer software development environments.

TI’s development environments offers a powerful set of integrated development tools that can be further enhanced with TI and third-party plug-ins.

With the integration of all these resources into one environment, LDRA and Texas Instruments deliver a combined solution that significantly boosts developer effectiveness and productivity, said a press release.

As the LDRA tool suite integration with Code Composer Studio uses TI’s own scripting API, developers gain seamless compilation, device programming and I/O capabilities.

When users instruct the TBrun unit test facility to run a test case, Code Composer Studio is invoked in a single operation in which code is built, loaded and executed on the chosen target, the execution data extracted and finally the results processed and reported.

Despite the small form factor and limited resources of many DSPs, all of the capabilities of the LDRA tool suite are available for the full range of TI DSPs, including the C2xxx, C55xx, and C6xxx series, said the release.

This extensive support is remarkable given that these DSPs have varying available execution space ranging from a few hundred kilobytes to as much as a few megabytes and also varying support for floating point units.

Due to the wide differentiation of the DSPs, tailored technical documentation is provided to ensure that developers can take full advantage of the capabilities of their particular platform.

“The integration of the LDRA tool suite and TI Code Composer provides Code Composer DSP users with a rich array of tools — including source code coverage, test harness creation and results capture — that are rarely available in small footprint environments,” said Ian Hennell, LDRA’s operations director.

“Since artefacts can be brought into TBreq for recording traceability, it opens the door for certification of safety-critical systems running on small devices to regimes as stringent as DO-178B Level A.”

This integration is actively used by a number of customers worldwide and has been used to ensure reliability of devices ranging from avionics systems to industrial equipment.

The LDRA tool suite integration supports both TI Code Composer studio 3.1 and 3.3 and is immediately available.

In addition, previous versions are supported by legacy integration packages, including TI Code Composer 2.21, added the release.