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Sandbridge offers a complete solution for baseband platform development:
the Sandblaster® Integrated Development Environment. This IDE combines
Sandbridge’s world-class optimizing C-compiler with debugger, simulator,
and profiling tools in a user-friendly environment that will accelerate
your development.
The Sandblaster® IDE provides the industry’s only DSP development
flow which is capable of producing production-ready executable software
based on high level language (‘C’) programming. Starting
with fixed-point C code, the compiler efficiently emits instructions
for the Sandblaster instruction set. Through use of semantic analysis
techniques in the compiler, the programmer can write C code in a processor-independent
manner and focus on the function to be implemented. From there, the compiler
can assess if saturated DSP operations are required and generate the
correct assembly code for the function. In addition to the compiler,
significant instrumentation and analysis tools are available within the
IDE to inform the developer of cycle counts, resource utilization, and
memory requirements via the built-in architectural simulator.
Run Time Software
Tightly coupled with the Sandblaster® architecture is the Sandblaster® Operating System (SBOST) - a DSP OS kernel designed to work hand-in-hand with the multithreaded Sandblaster™ hardware design. Software threads can be assigned to hardware threads in order to assure that algorithms execute within the timing constraints of the design. When using the 4-core SB3000® SoC, all 32 hardware threads can run at full speed, and each has full access to the quad Multiply/Accumulate per cycle vector unit. Time critical threads can run without interference from memory stalls or external interrupts - significantly improving predictability. This is particularly useful to allow highly complex 3G or broadband WiFi physical layer dataflow and filtering activity to run at full speed regardless of other loading on the processor. Software written with the POSIX pthreads definition can be assigned to hardware threads by the designer, or left to be automatically scheduled at run-time by the thread scheduler.
All together, Sandbridge's Sandblaster® IDE provides the most productive
flow for top-to-bottom communcation protocol development.
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