Viewing embedded register values with Eclipse

Embedded processors tend to require a registers configuration beyond the traditional CPU registers found in the x86 architecture. Power, interrupts, clocks, I/O hardware modules can have from several to dozens of different registers that contain configuration settings. Having to find the address for each register is relatively painful. Some processors make it even more difficult with a configurable base address. Once you've found the address you want you still have to figure out what the bits in the register mean and which configurations are valid.

Embedded development Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) like IAR's Embedded Workbench provide helpful address to value mappings for internal registers. EmbSys RegView is a plugin for Eclipse that breaks out the processors registers and fields (although it appears to lack a mapping for the meaning of the individual fields and the valid values).

Eclipse EmbSys Registers pane

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Chris M.

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