Study on an Integrated Development Environment for PAC with Complete Intellectual Property

Abstract

PAC(programmable automation controller) is a new trend of the industrial controller, but for now, most IDEs(integrated development environment) are still providing the PLC mode for users, which can not take full advantage of the PAC. Further more, in China, there is still not such IDE with complete intellectual properties for PACs designed by Chinese companies. For above purposes, the CHD-PACIDE was implemented which supported the ARM cortex-Mx series microcontrollers. This IDE consists of three layers, interface layer, data management layer and kernel layer, which managed functional modules respectively. Based on a C-like language Engineer C defined by our research team, the interface layer provided the structural graphical input mode and the text input mode for users to edit their code. The data management layer used the XML with specified format manage the flow of data. The kernel layer had two parts which were implemented in the IDE and the debug microcontroller stm8s, this layer can be used to debug user’s code through the Jtag port under the Coresight debugging structure of ARM. This IDE could be updated easily by adding the specific XML file for the new microcontroller used by the specific PAC.