ARM-CGT

The TI Arm® code generation (compiler) tools support development of applications for TI Arm-based platforms, especially those featuring TI Arm Cortex-M and Cortex-R series devices.

The current tools (ARM-CGT-CLANG) are derived from the open-source Clang compiler and its supporting LLVM infrastructure. The legacy proprietary (ARM-CGT) tools are in maintenance status and will receive bug fixes as needed. Please refer to the documentation for the software development kit (SDK) being used to confirm which compilers are supported. In general, the Clang based compiler is used for new products. 

Code Composer Studio™ is the Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for TI embedded devices. When starting development, it is recommended to begin by downloading Code Composer Studio as it includes the necessary TI compilers. For existing users of Code Composer Studio, compiler updates can be downloaded from with the environment.

• Excellent C/C++ standards support
• Source-based code coverage
• Support for migration from armcl (legacy TI compiler)
• Improved code size over armcl/gcc
• Excellent Performance
• Fast compile times
• GCC compatibility
• Linker and C runtime library optimization for reduced code size
• Function specialization, minimizing code size on common functions, including printf, memcpy, and memset
• Copy Table support, allowing automatic copying of code/data during runtime
• Initialized Data and Copy Table compression, reducing code size
• Security features such as ECC, CRC, and CMSE (for Cortex-M33)
• Optimized placement of function call trampolines
• Segmented memory spaces, allowing section placement into multiple ranges as well as split-placement 

Long-term and short-term support

TI has two types of compiler release streams, long-term support (LTS) and short-term support (STS).

Long-term support (LTS) releases are actively maintained for approximately two years with reported defects being repaired as follows:

• Production stop defects are addressed within 2 weeks,
• Critical defects are addressed within 90 days, and
• Defect repairs are proactively applied to each active release stream

Short-term support (STS) releases are only supported until the next release becomes available meaning that:

• Only production stop defects may cause patch releases to be created,

• Patch releases for STS releases will not be planned, and
• Defect repairs will not be proactively applied to each release stream

For more information about the distinction between LTS and STS compiler releases, please see the article: Introduction to LTS and STS Compiler Releases