Development suite speeds Atmel MCU development

A Crossware Products product story

Edited by the Electronicstalk editorial team Jan 19, 2010

Crossware has made its Development Suite for ARM compatible with Atmel's range of application examples available across the AT91SAM3U range of Cortex-M3-based Flash microcontrollers (MCU).

The enhanced Crossware suite allows developers using the AT91SAM3U MCUs to speed application development and to rapidly experiment with the SAM3U-EK evaluation board, understand the methods and techniques appropriate to the planned application and to make use of all the features provided within the Crossware environment.

More than 30 application examples are available demonstrating the use of the USB controller, the NAND flash controller, the SDIO/SD card controller, the MMC controller and various other on-chip peripherals.

FAT filing systems, USB mass storage devices, LCD, mouse and keyboard interfaces are also demonstrated.

The application examples are imported into the Crossware environment in a structured way to allow the developer to navigate through the source code and examine its operation.

Stepping through the code in the source level debugger viewing registers, global and local variables, memory and stack trace allows further understanding of the operation of the code.

The Crossware Workspace Creator uses the 'make' file for the GNU versions of the Atmel examples to create a set of library projects and an application project.

The appropriate command line options for the compiler, assembler and linker are determined and included in the build instructions.

The environment strings for the projects are determined and used to allow the compiler and assembler to access header files across directories and the linker to access the library files created by the library projects.

What would normally take hours of manual configuration is done in an instant.

The Atmel AT91SAM3U is an ARM Cortex-M3 Flash MCU integrating high-speed (480Mbps) USB Device-and-Transceiver, 4-bit 192Mbps SDIO/SDCard 2.0, 8-bit 384Mbps MMC 4.3 host and 48Mbps SPI interfaces on chip.

The AT91SAM3U is suitable for applications with intensive communications requirements, such as high-speed gateways in industrial, medical, data processing and consumer applications.

The Crossware ARM Development Suite runs on 32-bit and 64-bit Windows, features advanced C/C++ compiler, libraries, wizards, simulator and debugger, and provides a complete development environment for the ARM range of microprocessor cores.