Lauterbach Announces Support for Next-Generation Arm Processors

Hoehenkirchen, Germany — Lauterbach’s TRACE32® development tools now also support Arm’s newest leading-edge Armv9.2 processors: the recently announced next-generation Cortex-X4, Cortex-A720, and Cortex-A520. TRACE32® support includes simultaneous debugging of the heterogeneous CPU cores as well as non-intrusive CPU trace capture.

Arm’s Cortex-X4 is designed to deliver top-tier compute performance in System-on-Chips (SoCs), featuring an anticipated core clock speed of 3.4 GHz. The Cortex-A720 design was optimized to deliver more performance within the same power budget compared to the Cortex-A715. Arm's smallest core for this generation, the Cortex-A520, has the lowest power-to-area ratio of all three announced Armv9.2. Cortex cores and is primarily designed for performing low-intensity and background operational tasks to allow better power efficiency overall within the cluster. The Arm v9.2 architecture enables SoC core clusters of up to 14 cores, enabling increased support for higher-end mobile devices such as tablets and notebooks.

Lauterbach’s TRACE32® enables hardware-accelerated debugging and real-time tracing of all the heterogeneous Arm Cortex-Ax and other cores which Arm licensees implement on their SoCs. TRACE32® tools consist of the universal PowerView debugging and tracing software as well as debug and trace accelerator modules. While Lauterbach’s intelligent PowerDebug modules provide the highest available download speeds and smallest response times for efficient debugging and test automation, PowerTrace real-time trace modules provide full insights of what the CPUs and other cores of an Armv9.2. system are doing without impacting its real-time performance in any way. Trace analysis including code coverage measurements can support in bringing embedded designs to market faster, safer, and more reliably than ever.

TRACE32® enables simultaneous debugging and tracing of the Arm® Cortex®-A application processors and other cores in an SoC; a unique capability to cover the whole system. It does not matter whether the system is SMP (Symetric Multiprocessing), AMP (Asymetric Multiprocessing), or iAMP (Integrated Asymmetrical Multiprocessing). Lauterbach's innovative iAMP debug and trace technology enables to debug multicore systems with identical CPU instruction sets in just one TRACE32 PowerView GUI.

“Year after year, Arm delivers impressive advances in computing performance and energy efficiency in its newest applications processors”, says Norbert Weiss, Managing Director at Lauterbach GmbH. “And year after year, full support from our TRACE32 debug and trace tools is available along with Arm's announcement of the new cores".

Lauterbach’s TRACE32® enables developers of high-end devices to evolve applications at Armv9.2. SoCs, which implement Cortex-X4, Cortex-A720 and Cortex-A520, even faster and easier.

About Lauterbach

Lauterbach is the leading manufacturer of cutting-edge development tools for embedded systems with more than 40 years of experience. It is an international, well-established company, serving customers all over the world, partnering with all semiconductor manufacturers and growing steadily. At the headquarters in Hoehenkirchen, near Munich, the engineering team develops and produces highly proficient and specialized, easy-to-use Development Tools under the brand TRACE32®. Branch offices in United Kingdom, Italy, France, Tunisia, on the East and West coasts of the United States, Japan and China and highly qualified sales as well as support engineers in many other countries make Lauterbach’s full product range available worldwide.