Crossware Enhances ARM Development Suite with Support for More NXP Chips

CAMBRIDGE, England -- January 2, 2007 --Crossware (www.crossware.com), a leading embedded software tools developer, has added support to its ARM® Development Suite for 21 more NXP Semiconductor ARM-based microcontrollers. All of NXP’s LPC21xx and LPC22xx chips are now supported.

A number of the newly supported chips include an external memory controller allowing them to interface to external flash memory and external RAM. The Crossware environment makes it easy to configure this memory controller, and the chip’s memory interface pins – a process that would otherwise require a time-consuming study of the manufacturer’s data sheet and detailed analysis of the interaction between resources competing for the pins. The Crossware Code Creation Wizard presents a graphical view that shows clearly which pins will be allocated simultaneously.

Programming external memory also requires the debugger to pre-configure the chip prior to the download process. The Crossware environment can automatically create a configuration script either from the simulating program or from the configured hardware thereby eliminating the need for a script to be created manually.

Crossware’s experience of flash memory programming within the ColdFire architecture has been transferred to the ARM environment and so a wide range of flash memory chips are supported including AMD compatible flash memory and Intel’s Strataflash.

Code Creation Wizards will create code for all of the microcontrollers’ on-chip peripherals. Two interfaces to the Code Creation Wizards are provided within the ARM Development Suite. A graphical interface allows rapid configuration of the main elements of the peripheral. The other interface is more textual and presents the user with register and bitfield names and a ‘click and insert’ method for creating instructions that read and write registers, wait for bits to be set or cleared, etc. This second interface allows the user to generate arbitrary code rapidly and without reference to the manufacturer’s documentation.

The Crossware ARM Development Suite provides a complete and extremely user friendly development environment for the ARM family of microprocessor cores.