IAR Systems Announces Support for 4th Generation Stellari...

IAR Systems Announces Support for 4th Generation Stellaris Microcontrollers from Texas Instruments

IAR Systems has announced that IAR Embedded Workbench® for ARM® and IAR PowerPac for ARM now feature full support for the 4th generation of Texas Instruments Incorporated's (TI) award-winning ARM Cortex™-M3-based Stellaris® microcontroller (MCU) family.

New configuration files, flash loaders and project examples have been added to IAR Embedded Workbench for ARM for the new range of Stellaris MCUs. The device specific support achieved by these additions makes it quick and easy to get started with a project and allows the user to focus on application development.

New IAR PowerPac Board Support Packages (BSPs) will be made available for the three new kits (EKI-LM3S9B90, EKI-LM3S9B92, and DK-LM3S9B96) from TI. The BSPs include all the drivers and low level routines needed for the operating system and communication software to interface the hardware and access the peripherals on the boards.

“IAR Systems continues to be a tremendous partner of ours, proactively participating in every Stellaris product launch to date for the benefit of our mutual customers,” said Jean Anne Booth, worldwide M3 catalog marketing manager, TI. “We are proud to offer Stellaris evaluation and development kits with IAR Systems’ generous 32KB KickStart Edition of IAR Embedded Workbench for ARM.” “TI is, just like IAR Systems, committed to offering not only best-in-class products but also making them easy to access and use”, said Mats Ullström, Product Director, IAR Systems. “The higher performance and enhanced on-chip peripheral integration in the new devices which are added to an already impressive line-up will definitely speak to the embedded community.”

IAR Embedded Workbench for ARM, is a set of highly sophisticated and easy-to-use development tools. It incorporates an ARM Cortex-M3 C/C++ compiler, assembler, linker, librarian, text editor, project manager, and debugger combined in an integrated development environment (IDE) for programming embedded applications.

In addition to supporting debugging through the JTAG port, IAR Embedded Workbench also supports SWO, which is part of CoreSight, the on-chip debug and trace solution used in the Cortex processor family and in the Stellaris family. The user has full freedom to configure the types of packets sent over the SWO channel that should be displayed by IAR C-SPY debugger. Additionally, debug log messages from a printf output can be also displayed by IAR C-SPY, without having to halt the execution. IAR Embedded Workbench for ARM is developed to deliver high performance compiled code. The chip-specific code optimizer generates very efficient and reliable flashable code for the Stellaris family of microcontrollers. Recently added, multi-file compilation is a feature that allows the compiler to treat several files as one compilation unit which means it can optimize over a larger scope of code.

IAR PowerPac is a family of real-time operating system, file system and USB and TCP/IP communication stacks. It is integrated with IAR Embedded Workbench for ARM to ensure quick and easy project start-up and application development.

The 4th generation of Stellaris ARM Cortex-M3-based MCUs feature new combinations of connectivity, memory configurations, and advanced motion control. The new devices include six MCUs in TI’s new LM3S9000 Series (featuring an on-chip combination of 10/100 Ethernet MAC/PHY, USB On-The-Go, and Controller Area Network) and two new MCUs each for the LM3S2000 CAN Series and LM3S5000 USB and CAN Series. The new Stellaris family members further extend the industry’s largest ARM-based MCU product line by adding higher performance with speeds up to 100 MHz and lower operating power with 130nm low power technology.