Processor Expert has built-in knowledge (internal definitions) about all microcontroller units and integrated peripherals. The microcontroller units and peripherals are encapsulated into configurable components called embedded components, each of which provides a set of useful properties, methods, and events.
The following are the main features of Processor Expert:
- The application is created from components called embedded components.
- Embedded components encapsulate functionality of basic elements of embedded systems like processor core, processor on-chip peripherals, FPGA, standalone peripherals, virtual devices, and pure software algorithms, and change these facilities to properties, methods, and events (like objects in OOP).
- Processor Expert connects, and generates the drivers for embedded system hardware, peripherals, or used algorithms. This allows you to concentrate on the creative part of the whole design process.
- Processor Expert allows true top-down style of application design. You can start the design directly by defining the application behavior.
- Processor Expert works with an extensible components library of supported microprocessors, peripherals, and virtual devices.
- Processor Expert peripheral initialization components generate effective initialization code for all on-chip devices and support all their features.
- Logical Device Drivers (LDD components) are efficient set of embedded components that are used together with RTOS. They provide a unified hardware access across microcontrollers allowing to develop simpler and more portable RTOS drivers or bare board application. For more details, refer to the Logical Device Drivers topic.
- Processor Expert allows to examine the relationship between the embedded component setup and control registers initialization.
- You can create your own components using the Component Development Environment (CDE) tool.
An intuitive and powerful user interface allows you to define the system behavior in several steps. A simple system can be created by selecting the necessary components, setting their properties to the required values and also dragging and dropping some of their methods to the user part of the project source code.
The other key features are:
- Design-time verifications
- Microcontroller selection from multiple microcontroller derivatives available
- Microcontroller pin detailed description and structure viewing
- Configuration of functions and settings for the selected microcontroller and its peripherals
- Definition of system behavior during initialization and at runtime
- Design of application from pre-built functional components
- Design of application using component methods (user callable functions) and events (templates for user written code to process events, e.g. interrupts)
- Customization of components and definition of new components
- Tested drivers
- Library of components for typical functions (including virtual SW components)
- Verified reusable components allowing inheritance
- Verification of resource and timing contentions
- Concept of project panel with ability to switch/port between microcontroller family derivatives
- Code generation for components included in the project
- Implementation of user written code
- Interface with Freescale CodeWarrior
This section includes the following topics: