Embedded World: Atmel Studio 6 integrates ARM and AVR design

The new version now supports both Atmel 32bit ARM Cortex-M series processor based and Atmel 8/32bit AVR based microcontrollers. Joerg Bertholdt, Atmel's director of marketing, MCU Tools and Software, told New Electronics: "Atmel Studio 6 enables engineers provides the seamless integration with other toolsets that our AVR mcu development community has long experienced. It significantly reduces the cost of creating new designs because it's free, provides professional quality development tools and comes with Atmel Software Framework. The framework provides a large library of source code, including around 1000 project examples, enabling design engineers to eliminate writing most of the low level source code for their projects." The software framework includes a full set of drivers for on chip peripherals and external components, wired and wireless communication stacks, audio decoding, graphics rendering, and fixed and floating point math libraries. For Atmel's ARM processor based microcontrollers, the library provides full support for the Cortex Microcontroller Software Interface Standard (CMSIS). Atmel Studio 6 currently supports roughly 300 of the company's mcus. "Atmel Studio 6 makes it easy for engineers to write, build and debug their C/C++ and assembly code," added Bertholdt. "[It] also brings together, in seamless fashion, an editor with assisted code writing, a wizard for quickly creating new projects, a GNU C/C++ Compiler, a powerful simulator, and a front end visualisation tool for all of Atmel's Cortex-M series and AVR processor programmers and in circuit debuggers." Atmel Studio 6 is available as a beta release, free of charge, and can be downloaded at http://www.atmel.com/atmelstudio. It is 100% backwards compatible with AVR Studio 5 and supports currently available AVR and SAM3 Cortex-M3 processor Flash-based mcu evaluation kits. *Atmel also announced an expansion of its SAM3 ARM Cortex-M3 processor-based mcu family with 40 new devices for a applications such as industrial automation, smart grid, and building and home control. Throughout 2012, the SAM3 and SAM4 families will quadruple the Atmel Cortex-M series processor portfolio to nearly 200 ARM processor-based mcus and include devices with on chip memory densities of up to 2MB Flash, 192KB of sram and peripherals such as high speed USB host and device with on chip physical layer, Ethernet and dual CAN.