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Thursday, December 10, 2009

First Cortex-M0 microcontroller starter kit

$139 starter kit for popular low cost microcontroller



IAR Systems has developed what it believes to be the world's first commercial starter kit for ARM Cortex-M0-based microcontrollers for the NXP LPC1114.
One of the features which enabled the speedy development of this kit was the fact that the NXP LPC11xx Cortex-M0 family is 100% pin compatible with the NXP LPC13xx Cortex-M3 family. "This kit is proof of that concept. We were able to re-use 100% of the design from our recently released LPC1343 kit," said Sara Skrtic, Development Kits Manager at IAR Systems. Both the Cortex-M0, and Cortex-M3 processor families are supported by the new competitively priced IAR Embedded Workbench for ARM Cortex-M toolchain.
"Ease of development and migration path within the two compatible families is the main theme at NXP" says Geoff Lees, General Manager, Microcontroller Division, NXP. "We see this as true compatibility, not just peripheral compatibility between an older 8-bit core, and a different 32-bit architecture. We are extremely pleased with IAR Systems' commitment to our new Cortex-M0 family, and are very confident of their success with this kit."
The KickStart Kit for LPC1114 contains all the necessary hardware and software for engineers to quickly design, develop, integrate and test Cortex-M0 applications. The NXP LPC111x family of devices are low-cost 32-bit MCUs designed for 8/16-bit applications and offer good performance, low power consumption, a simple instruction set and memory addressing together with small code size.
It includes a development board fitted with the LPC1114 microcontroller, an 8K KickStart edition of IAR Embedded Workbench for ARM, and a 20-state evaluation edition of IAR visualSTATE.
The board also provides debug support through IAR J-Link-OB, a standard JTAG connector or a small SWD connector. The board is powered via the USB interface, removing the need for any external power supply. It also provides some user configurable devices such as a small LCD, buttons and LEDs, analogue trim wheel, buzzer and a prototyping area. In addition, the UART pins are routed to a DB9 connector.
The J-Link-OB is a small board mounted JTAG/SWD debug interface that connects via USB to the PC host running Windows. It integrates into IAR Embedded Workbench, an Integrated Development Environment with a complete and easy-to-use set of C/C++ cross compiler and debugger tools for professional embedded applications. It contains project manager, editor, linker and librarian tools, C-SPY debugger, full integration with IAR J-Link, complete upgrade path available from IAR Systems. IAR visualSTATE is a UML-compliant graphical design environment for reactive systems, with advanced formal verification and validation tools as well as a very powerful code generator.

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