Freescale Semiconductor partners with IAR Systems to reach new performance high

Uppsala, Sweden—January 29, 2013— IAR Systems® today announced that its development tool suite IAR Embedded Workbench® has helped partner Freescale Semiconductor achieve unmatched performance scores for its Kinetis K70 microcontroller (MCU) series. The scores were measured on the industry-standard CoreMark® benchmark, where the Kinetis K70 MCU together with IAR Embedded Workbench attained a score of 3.40 CoreMark/MHz.

“The powerful optimizations provided by IAR Embedded Workbench deliver outstanding performance for a Kinetis microcontroller,” says Geoff Lees, senior vice president and general manager of Freescale’s MCU business group. “Our Kinetis K70 series is designed for scalable performance, integration, connectivity, communications, HMI and security, and features exceptional integration along with powerful signal conversion, conditioning and control. The latest version of IAR Embedded Workbench increases code efficiency and delivers more energy-efficient, higher performing embedded applications.”

Freescale’s Kinetis K microcontroller series is based on the ARM® Cortex™-M4 core. The series is built from 90 nm thin-film storage (TFS) flash technology and offers low power consumption combined with high performance and mixed signal analog integration. The Kinetis K70 MCU family features an integrated graphic LCD controller and a single-precision floating-point unit.

The top-ranking benchmark scores were accomplished using the latest version of IAR Embedded Workbench for ARM, version 6.50. IAR Embedded Workbench is a complete C/C++ development tool suite with support for all ARM cores. It features the powerful IAR C/C++ Compiler™ with multiple levels of high performance optimizations, as well as the comprehensive C-SPY® Debugger.

• Read more about IAR Systems’ tools for Freescale Kinetis microcontrollers at www.iar.com/kinetis.
• Download evaluation versions of IAR Embedded Workbench from www.iar.com/ewarm.

About CoreMark

CoreMark was developed by the Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium EEMBC®, a non-profit industry association for embedded microprocessor benchmarks. CoreMark is a simple, yet sophisticated, benchmark that is designed specifically to test the functionality of a processor core. Running CoreMark produces a single-number score allowing users to make quick comparisons between processors. Scores are published at www.coremark.org.