Altium broadens ARM Cortex-M device support to its TASKING C compiler for ARM

SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA: Altium Ltd announced a new release of its TASKING compiler suite for ARM, delivering support for many additional Cortex-M based microcontrollers including STMicroelectronics, Freescale, Atmel, Texas Instruments and many others.

The enhanced version brings pin assignment functionality to the toolset, which is another step forward in helping engineers to speed up application development.

Altium supports the ARM Cortex-M development community through its TASKING VX-toolset for ARM, consisting of an Eclipse based IDE, C and C++ compiler, multi-core ready linker, simulator, in-circuit debugger, and TASKING’s award winning Software Platform, which enables the developer to complete the application in a fast and cost-efficient way with RTOS and a wide range of middleware components.

Release v5.1 of the toolset adds support for many new microcontroller variants, such as the full Kinetis range from Freescale, the Tiva C series from Texas Instruments and the Cortex-M based variants from Atmel’s SMART series. Also, the support for existing vendors’ devices has been extended, such as the STMicroelectronics STM32 L0, Spansion’s FM0 and FM4, and Silicon Labs EFM32.

The broadened device toolset support for the industry’s most popular Cortex-M microcontrollers enables developers to easily change semiconductor manufacturer and switch controller type, not being locked-in by vendor specific development tools..

Currently, many microcontrollers are equipped with a large number of on-chip peripheral modules, but the limited number of pins on the chip usually does not allow all modules to be used simultaneously. TASKING’s new Pin Mapper functionality removes the developer’s complex challenge of configuring the chip’s hardware registers that are used for assigning the peripheral module signals to the physical pins.

The Pin Mapper provides a visual representation of the pin layout within the toolset IDE, through which the developer can configure and review properties of the pins, like its Power Domain, Reset State and Pad Status. The Pin Mapper also visually reports errors or warnings for possible connection conflicts, saving the developer from the tedious task of maintaining an overview of the pin assignments in Excel tables.

The visually oriented Pin Mapper is a natural extension to the toolset’s award winning Software Platform technology, and both are seamlessly integrated into the Eclipse based IDE. The TASKING Software Platform contains a wide collection of frequently used middleware components, such as TCP/IP, USB, CAN, web server, graphical user-interface, and an RTOS.

At the cost of a traditional development toolset the developer gets everything to build an application much faster than is possible with other compiler suites and additional third party middleware \components.