17 March 2009

IAR Systems & Atmel Team On AT91SAM ARM Micros

IAR Systems AB and Atmel Corporation, both members of the ARM Connected Community have teamed to enhance support for Atmel’s entire AT91SAM family of ARM-based Flash microcontrollers and embedded microprocessors in the latest release of IAR Embedded Workbench.

The product of intensive collaborative development between the two companies, this powerful toolkit simplifies and accelerates application development for Atmel’s AT91SAM micros.

“The enhanced support for our AT91SAM products provided by version 5.30 of IAR Embedded Workbench for ARM is another step forward in the long-term collaboration between Atmel and IAR Systems in order to make it easier, faster and cheaper to develop AT91SAM applications. Our large and growing mutual customer base is proof of our success to date, and we intend to build on it going forward,” commented Jean-Christophe Zettel, Atmel’s Applications Director for ARM-based MCUs.

“IAR Systems and Atmel have been working together closely for many years, but this higher level of engagement from both sides has added a new dimension of support and ease of use for AT91SAM customers,” added Anders Flodin, Director Business Development, IAR Systems.

The features of IAR Embedded Workbench version 5.30 for ARM number enhanced debug facilities including views of core and peripheral registers for all AT91SAM devices, initialization scripts for AT91SAM devices and all compatible external memories, and debug features in embedded Flash memory.

Application deployment is made more efficient by single-click programming options for all memory types - embedded Flash, external NAND, NOR, EEPROM and serial Flash. The source code for these programming algorithms is available, ready to be updated for new memory configurations. Source code is also available for a second-level boot loader, enabling it to be modified for different memory implementations.

Over 700 fully documented project examples are available from the IAR Systems website for the various supported AT91SAM devices, each with options for all possible memory configurations. These can be cloned to form the starting point of customer applications, saving valuable development time and reducing errors.