IAR Systems ups performance for the ultra-low-power MSP430 microcontrollers from Texas Instruments

Uppsala, Sweden—November 21, 2013—IAR Systems® announces that its embedded development toolchain IAR Embedded Workbench® for MSP430 delivers leading benchmark results for Texas Instruments’ MSP430 core. EEMBC® CoreMark® results (http://www.eembc.org/coremark/) published by Texas Instruments depict a score of 27.70 CoreMarks running at 25 MHz, resulting in a normalized score of 1.1 CoreMark/MHz. Compared to previous results for MSP430, the scores are increased by around 40 percent.

The results have been achieved using version 5.52 of IAR Embedded Workbench for MSP430, set to high optimization for code speed with no code size constraints. Further enhancements to the development tools have been added with version 5.60, which includes new libraries and integrations. The integrated TI Math Library for MSP430 includes floating-point routines that can be used in computationally intensive real-time applications where optimal execution speed is critical. By using these routines instead of the routines found in the existing run-time-support libraries, developers can gain an additional performance boost in any application that use floating point scalar math, without rewriting existing code.

“This breakthrough performance lift is a huge achievement from our partner IAR Systems and it provides new possibilities for our customers,” comments Priya Thanigai, Product Marketing Engineer, MSP430, Texas Instruments. “Our MSP430 microcontrollers are used mainly in ultra-low-power applications. Enabling optimized and speed-efficient code is crucial in order to truly keep the power consumption to a minimum for these applications.”

IAR Embedded Workbench for MSP430 is a complete set of powerful and reliable tools for building and debugging embedded systems based on the 16-bit MSP430 microcontroller family. IAR Embedded Workbench includes a highly-optimizing C/C++ compiler and a comprehensive debugger in a user-friendly integrated development environment. It also integrates Texas Instruments’ power optimization teaching tool ULP Advisor™ software that uses a static code analyzer to offer tips and tricks to help developers understand where they can improve their code to minimize power consumption.

For any further enquiries regarding this topic, please contact Glenn Moloney at Indes - IDS B.V.

21-11-2013