Company History
IAR Systems is a world-leading provider of embedded development tools. IAR Systems customers represent many different market segments such as telecommunications, industrial automation and the automotive industry. The company was founded in 1983 and is part of the Nocom Group since 2005. IAR Systems operates in the US, China, Japan, Germany, the UK, Sweden and Brazil as well as through a large net of distributors all over the world.

Product lines include: IAR Embedded Workbench - integrated development environment with C/C++ compiler and debugger supporting about 30 different 8 , 16-, and 32-bit devices.
IAR visualSTATE - state chart design tool for development of event-driven systems.
IAR KickStart Kit - complete software and hardware evaluation environment available for selected targets.
IAR Advanced Development Kit - integrated suite containing all the necessary components for full product development.
IAR PowerPac - a fully-featured real-time operating system (RTOS) combined with a high performance file system, a USB device stack, and a TCP/IP communication stack.

Company's Primary Business Model

To sell licenses and support services for the embedded development tools market.
 
Company Objective

IAR Systems is a leading supplier of embedded development tools for the ARM community, with a comprehensive network of tool partners.

Primary Solution
IAR YellowSuite - a complete, integrated development solution for ARM.

IAR YellowSuite is a series of development tools that covers the entire development process. It promotes the most natural design flow-design and test in automation, building in efficiency, code integrity and flexibility right from the beginning of a design project. All the tools in IAR YellowSuite are highly integrated to work together, which helps you to produce the perfect result at the shortest time.

IAR YellowSuite offers you one-stop-shopping From Idea to Target, seamless integration and integrity, perfect optimal result, a well established support program and half time to market.

• Design, validate, test and verify the control logic of your application in IAR visualSTATE
• Empower the application with RTOS, file system and other middleware from IAR PowerPac
• Build and debug your application in IAR Embedded Workbench
• Test on real hardware via IAR J-Link, IAR J-trace, IAR Kicktart Kit and IAR Advanced Development Kit.

C/C++ compiler and debugger tools
IAR Embedded Workbench is a set of highly sophisticated and easy-to-use development tools for programming embedded applications. It integrates the IAR C/C++ compiler, assembler, linker, librarian, text editor, project manager, and C-SPY debugger in one integrated development environment (IDE). With its built-in chip-specific code optimizer, IAR Embedded Workbench generates very efficient and reliable FLASH/PROMable code for ARM devices.

• Support for ARM7, ARM9, ARM9E, ARM10
• ARM11, Cortex-M1, Cortex-M3, SecurCore and Intel
• XScale
• ARM embedded application binary interface (EABI compliance)
• Support for ARM, Thumb1 and Thumb2 processor modes
• Comprehensive language extensions allowing detailed tailoring of embedded applications
• Advanced optimizations in code size and speed
• Non-intrusive real-time tracing of instructions, data and profiling for performance analysis via IAR J-Trace
• Multi-core debugging via IAR J-Link
• Extensive plugins for RTOS and hardware debugging support in C-SPY debugger
• Flying start with ready-made device configuration files flash loaders and example projects

State machine design and test tools
IAR visualSTATE is a set of powerful development tools for designing, testing and implementing embedded applications based on state machines. It provides advanced verification and validation utilities and generates very compact C code that is 100% consistent with your system design.

• Graphical state machine design based on the Unified Modeling Language (UML) subset
• Formal verification to avoid unwanted properties in the design, like dead-ends or unreachable states etc.
• Test and validation to ensure at an early stage of design that the application behaves as expected, even before the hardware exists
• Automatic code generation providing very compact C/C++ code, 100% compliant with the design
• Automatic documentation generation with comprehensive Information
• True state machine debugging on hardware via plugin to IAR Embedded Workbench
• Ready-made project examples for various evaluation boards

RTOS and middleware components
IAR PowerPac is an integrated middleware toolset for developing embedded applications. It contains a fully featured real-time operating system (RTOS) and a high-performance file system, yet highly optimized for minimum memory consumption in both RAM and ROM. The USB Device Stack is available as an optional add-on. IAR PowerPac is available at an innovative, low-risk per-seat license model-without royalty fees. The RTOS kernel and the file system are available in library and source code format.

• Pre-emptive multi-tasking
• Round-robin scheduling
• Unlimited number of tasks, software timers, semaphores and mailboxes
• Zero interrupt latency
• No configuration needed
• Small memory footprint
• Very fast context switch time
  

• MS-DOS/MS-Windows compatible FAT12, FAT16 and FAT32 support
• Multiple device driver support
• Multiple media support
• ANSI C stdio.h-like API for user applications
• OS support
  

• Device drivers for most common USB devices
• Supports MSD, BULK, CDC and HID
• Key communication classes
• Supports USB 1.1 & 2.0 devices
• High transfer rate on USB 2.0
  

• Ready to run projects for supported microcontrollers
• Protocols: TCP, IP, UDP, ARP, DHCP (client), ICMP, TFTP
• Highly optimized for minimum memory consumption & high speed
• Standard socket interface
• Zero data copy for fast performance
• Connections limited only by available memory
• Zero compile time configuration -> code can be compiled into a library

Development kits and hardware debug probes
IAR KickStart Kit contains all the necessary hardware and software, allowing you to design, develop, integrate and test your applications at a very cost effective way. IAR KickStart Kit is available for various devices and boards from Atmel, Luminar, NXP, OKI, ST, TI etc.

IAR J-Link, a small hardware JTAG/SWD debugger, and IAR J-Trace, a hardware trace debugger, are fully integrated with IAR Embedded Workbench for ARM.

• Support ARM7, ARM9 and Cortex M3 devices, including thumb mode.
• Download speed up to 720 Kbytes/sec the fastest JTAG probe in the industry!
• Support for multiple devices on scan chain USB 2 .0 interface
  

• 2 Mbyte trace buffer
• Trace supports up to 200 MHz full and 100 MHz half clock rate
• Trace based on ARM ETM (Embedded Trace Macrocell)
• Trace window synchronizes to source and disassembly window
• IAR Embedded Workbench - integrated development environment with C/C++ compiler and debugger supporting about 30 different 8 , 16-, and 32-bit devices.
• IAR visualSTATE - state chart design tool for development of event-driven systems.
• IAR KickStart Kit - complete software and hardware evaluation environment available for selected targets
• IAR Advanced Development Kit - integrated suite containing all the necessary components for full product development
• IAR PowerPac - a fully-featured real-time operating system (RTOS) combined with a high performance file system. USB device stack and TCP/IP protocol stack are additional options.

Target Markets?
IAR Systems customers represent many different market segments such as telecommunications, industrial automation and the automotive industry.

What is unique about the solutions from IAR Systems?
IAR Systems adds value to its customers by providing a flexible choice of easy-to-use development tools that generate compact and reliable code, tight integration with a wide range of partner products such as RTOSes and emulators, innovative business models and local technical support.
 
Company History with ARM

How long has the company been working with ARM?
Since 1999.

Why have you chosen to work with ARM?
IAR Systems have for many years had a close partnership with ARM. The ARM architecture, being the leader of the 32-bit MCU market and IAR Systems being the leading supplier of tools for the 32-bit MCU market makes this a natural and very fruitful cooperation.

ARM technologies that IAR Systems supports?
ARM7, ARM9, ARM9E, ARM10E, ARM11, Cortex-M1, Cortex-M3, XScale.

Do you have a specialist area as an ARM Partner?
Independent supplier of embedded development tools for ARM.

What one experience comes to mind during your early years working with ARM?
When the sales took off in 2003-2004 and we tripled our sales was of course a great period.

For more on the ARM Connected Community and IAR Systems go to:

Connected Community: http://www.arm.com/community/
IAR Systems: http://www.iar.com/

Additional Articles
Real-time operating systems-does your system need one?
ftp://ftp.iar.se/WWWfiles/Viewpoints/RTOS.pdf
Choosing an ARM processor-ARM7 vs Cortex-M3
ftp://ftp.iar.se/WWWfiles/Viewpoints/Choosing_an_ARM_Processor.pdf