Oki Semiconductor Incorporates Unique Features to Deliver Industry's Lowest Cost, Easy to Use ARM-based Evaluation Kit

New Fully-featured AME-51 Evaluation Kit allows designers to quickly evaluate Oki's 4050/4060 Series Advantage Microcontrollers

Sunnyvale, Calif., August 8, 2005 - Oki Semiconductor, a leading technology partner for the new era of digital communications and convergence, today announced the availability of a low-cost, full-featured evaluation kit for its ARM7TMDI-based 4050/4060 Series Advantage Microcontrollers. At a suggested resale price of $249, Oki's Advantage Microcontroller Evaluation Kit (AME-51)is the lowest priced 'complete-in-one-box' ARM-based evaluation solution in the industry. The AME-51 kit enables product designers to easily integrate Oki's 4060 Series - The World's Smallest ARM - and 4050 Series MCUs into their designs. Based on ARM's 32-bit architecture, Oki's AME-51 Kit provides designers with a complete and flexible 'plug and play' evaluation environment that is easy to use. This evaluation kit offers designers unique features to shorten the time to market for their products.

Value-Added Customer Benefits and Features

To further address the needs of today's designers of electronic products and devices, Oki's AME-51 Evaluation Board has been designed for modular expansion. All signals from the MCU have been brought to headers on the edge of the board allowing for easy expansion and signal probing. For faster and easier evaluation of the MCU features, the AME-51 Board includes an I2C temperature sensor; an analog potentiometer tied to the ADC; two RS-232 connectors; a seven segment LED; additional user LEDs and pushbutton switches. All MCU system operating modes can be easily configured through convenient on-board switch settings.

A key benefit of Oki's AME-51 Evaluation Board is that it allows an unlimited number of break points during debug, as well as instantaneous reload of the program code to the MCU. This feature overcomes a common limitation of competing products that have insufficient hardware breakpoints, and decreases development time by eliminating the need to reprogram the on-chip flash for each code modification. Commonly know as ROM emulation, this key feature is achieved by making use of the 1MB of external SRAM provided on the AME-51 board and the capabilities of the development tools included in the kit.

Commenting on Oki's AME-51 Evaluation Kit, Dan Beadle, president of Incline Softworks LLC, said, "Thanks to the integrated capabilities of the tools and the AME-51 Board I was able to quickly isolate and correct the errors in my design. The source level debugging combined with the extended target visibility allowed me to keep my focus on solving the problem and not operating the tool."

Taking a leadership position in providing cost-effective ARM-based evaluation solutions, Oki continues to build on the success of its growing line of ARM-based Advantage Microcontrollers and related development solutions, by offering designers an industry-standard MCU platform with strong industry support, including a constantly growing number of off-the-shelf software applications, and a wide variety of tools and software from third-party vendors. Oki's AME-51 Kit was developed as part of its partnership with IAR Systems to meet the needs of its designers who require a low-cost 'plug and play' solution that will enable them to quickly evaluate Oki's 4050/4060 Advantage Microcontrollers for use in their designs.

Oki's AME-51 Kit, which is targeted for designers of electronic consumer, industrial, automotive, medical devices and general embedded systems, contains Oki's modular 4050/4060 Series evaluation board, IAR Systems' software development and debug environment, and full JTAG debug capabilities via a Universal Serial Bus (USB) connection. It also includes example source code for device peripherals, and Flash-programming tools. Moreover, Oki's AME-51 Board is powered via the USB eliminating the need for a separate power supply. Everything required for evaluation and initial development is included with the AME-51 kit further shortening time to market for product development.

"It was great! I had the system up and running, modified the sample code and watched the LEDs flash on the board the way I wanted them to in about ten minutes. Having everything that I needed included in the box made a significant difference and was a great time saver," Beadle added.

AME-51 Support and Development Tool

• Oki's AME-51 Evaluation Kit is compatible with Microsoft Windows and supported by the following industry-leading software development tools provided by IAR Systems:
• IAE Embedded Workbench for ARM, which is a complete integrated development environment that offers designers the following benefits:
  • Kick Start 32KB C/C++ complier, assembler, linker, code editor, JTAG debugger with target control, and Instruction Set Simulator (ISS);
  • The debugger offers extended target visibility allowing access to all of Oki?s 4050/4060 Series Advantage Microcontroller registers by name.? In addition, the debugger has an integrated Flash loader, which enables programming of the internal Flash of Oki MCUs;
  • IAR Embedded Workbench for ARM is RTOS aware for popular RTOSes on the market.
• Oki's In-System-Flash-Programmer (ISFP) is a Windows GUI-based utility that enables reprogramming of the on-chip Flash via one of its UARTs using the serial cable included with the kit.

"IAR Systems is excited about working with Oki to bring to market the industry's lowest cost full-featured ARM-based MCU evaluation kit," said Andreas Lifvendahl, global account manager, IAR Systems. "To enable full development with tools from IAR Systems, an incremental upgrade path is available."

Customers needing greater than 32KB compilation only need to purchase an upgrade for IAR Embedded Workbench with its built-in C/C++ compiler and debugger tools. This enables seamless migration from evaluating the MCU to full product development with complete backward compatibility with any code already developed on the AME-51 evaluation kit.

Product Availability

Oki's AME-51 Kit is available now through its distributors Nu Horizons, and Mouser. As a service to customers, Oki Semiconductor, Nu Horizons and IAR Systems will offer regional training seminars on the 4050/4060 Series Advantage Microcontrollers and the IAR Systems development environment. Moreover, customers who pre-register for the training seminars will be able to purchase Oki's AME-51 Kit at an introductory rate of $199 through Nu Horizons. The seminar schedules and registration are available at www.okisemi.com/us.

About IAR Systems

IAR Systems is one of the world's leading providers of programming tools for embedded systems. Its business concept is to offer products and services that help customers reduce development time and accelerate time to market. IAR Systems' customers represent many different market segments such as telecommunications, industrial automation and the automotive industry.
The company was founded in 1983 and operates in the US, China, Japan, Brazil, Germany, the UK, Sweden and Denmark and has a large net of distributors all over the world. For additional information about IAR Systems, visit www.iar.com.

About Nu Horizons Electronics Corp.

Nu Horizons is a leading global distributor of advanced technology active components and system solutions, including analog, clock and timing devices, communications, computer products, discretes, flat panel display solutions, interface, logic, memory, microcontrollers and microprocessors, opto electronics and power, to a wide variety of commercial original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). With sales facilities in thirty-seven locations across North America and Asia, and logistics centers in centralized locations throughout the globe, Nu Horizons partners with a limited number of best-in-class suppliers to provide in-depth product and solutions expertise to its customers. Information on Nu Horizons and its services is available at www.nuhorizons.com.

About Oki Semiconductor

Building on Oki's century-long commitment to communications technologies and markets, Oki Semiconductor designs and markets a broad line of advanced integrated circuits for telecommunications, network, automotive, computer and consumer products. Oki's product lines include telecommunications, RF, laser, networking, speech synthesis, ASIC, microcontroller and memory devices, offered in a variety of creative packages. Founded in 1977 and headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif., Oki Semiconductor is a division of Oki America Inc., which is a subsidiary of Oki Electric Industry Co, Ltd. Oki has ISO-9000-certified manufacturing facilities in Japan and Thailand. Information on Oki Semiconductor and its products is available at www.okisemi.com/us.

Advantage Microcontrollers is a trademark of Oki Semiconductor and Oki Electric, Ltd.

ARM and ARM7TDMI are registered trademarks of ARM Limited. ARM7 is a trademark of ARM Limited. ARM is used to represent ARM Holdings plc (LSE: ARM and Nasdaq: ARMHY); its operating company ARM Limited; and the regional subsidiaries ARM, INC.; ARM KK; ARM Korea LTD.; ARM Taiwan; ARM France SAS; and ARM Consulting (Shanghai) Co. Ltd.

IAR Systems and IAR Embedded Workbench are registered trademarks owned by IAR Systems AB.

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