Source: IAR Systems
October 9, 2007

IAR Systems introduces complete integrated development suite for ColdFire® microcontrollers

IAR Systems, the market leader in tools for 32-bit MCUs, strengthens its portfolio by introducing a complete development suite for Freescale ColdFire MCU architecture

IAR YellowSuite™ for ColdFire® microcontrollers promotes a natural design flow from the beginning of a development project, integrating all the necessary tools to produce a working design in the shortest possible time. The development tools included in IAR YellowSuite for ColdFire microcontrollers comprise: IAR Embedded Workbench®, for building and debugging the application; IAR visualSTATE®, for design, validation, test and verification of the control logic; IAR PowerPac™ RTOS, file system and associated middleware; and an IAR KickStart Kit™, to test the application on real hardware.

“The introduction of the development suite for ColdFire devices is a milestone for IAR Systems,” commented Mats Ullström, Product Director of IAR Systems. “The Flexis™ QE128 series is already attracting a lot of attention from developers, and we believe that IAR YellowSuite will provide the optimum solution for them to achieve the best results in the shortest possible time.”

“We are delighted that designers building embedded systems based on our ColdFire V1 and V2 cores can now use IAR YellowSuite for ColdFire microcontrollers,” said Jeff Bock, global product marketing manager for Freescale’s Consumer and Industrial Microcontroller Operation. “This means that developers using the advanced Flexis MCF51QE128 – the first MCU based on the ColdFire V1 core – will have access to a powerful suite of development tools, as well as broad ecosystem support.”
IAR Embedded Workbench, with support for ColdFire V1 and V2 cores, is a set of highly sophisticated and easy-to-use development tools – C/C++ compiler, assembler, linker, librarian, text editor, project manager, and debugger – combined in an integrated development environment (IDE) for programming embedded applications. With its built-in chip-specific code optimizer, IAR Embedded Workbench generates very efficient and reliable FLASH/PROMable code for ColdFire devices.
IAR visualSTATE is a set of powerful graphical development tools for designing, testing and implementing embedded applications based on state machines and on the Unified Modeling Language (UML) subset. It provides advanced verification and validation utilities, and generates very compact C code that is 100% consistent with the system design. visualSTATE features RTOS-aware debugging, with a built-in plugin for IAR PowerPac.

IAR PowerPac is an integrated middleware toolset for developing embedded applications, with a low-risk per-seat license model. IAR PowerPac contains a fully featured real-time operating system (RTOS) and a high-performance file system, which is highly optimized for minimum memory consumption in both RAM and ROM. A USB device stack is available as optional add-on to IAR PowerPac.

The IAR KickStart Kit for ColdFire will be introduced later in October, and contains all the necessary hardware, software and ready-made example projects to allow the cost-effective design, development, integration and test of applications in a very efficient way.