IDE

The Diamond Interactive Development Environment, or IDE, is a tool based on Eclipse that you can use to develop multiprocessor applications with 3L Diamond.

The IDE presents a simple interface to Diamond and performs much of the housekeeping needed to specify and build applications. In particular, it manages your files and takes over the creation and maintenance of configuration files and makefiles. Our aim is that you should find the operation of the IDE to be intuitive;  you should achieve obvious effects in obvious ways.

There are many options that appear in the IDE only as a result of its Eclipse heritage; options that are not directly related to using Diamond  are not discussed here but can be investigated in the published Eclipse documentation.

The IDE is built round the concept of a workspace in which you construct one or more projects. You start developing a Diamond application by creating a project where you can keep all the information needed to build and maintain your code. You can structure your work by having several workspaces for different activities or simply keep all of your projects in a single workspace.

Creating a new project automatically gives you a single processor called root of the default processor type, but you can easily change a processor's type. You can now add any other processors you need and connect them with wires.

The next step is to create tasks for each processor. You can specify the various files that are needed to build tasks and describe dependencies amongst them. The types of files you need  depend on the sort of processor on which the task is placed. The IDE offers to supply trivial examples of the basic files appropriate to the processor when you create a task. A different set of files is selected if you move the task to a different sort of processor. You can include files for many different technologies and the IDE selects the appropriate set automatically.

The final step is to specify the channels making connections between your tasks.

The IDE examines your project when asked to generate an application and builds each task using the tools appropriate to the processor on which it has been placed. For example, C6000 DSP tasks are built using the TI compiler and linker while FPGA tasks are constructed using the Xilinx tools. Once all the tasks have been built, the IDE constructs a configuration file and passes it to the configurer to create the final application file. This can then be loaded into your processor network and executed from within the IDE.