Crossware Enhances ARM Suite to Speed Application Development for Atmel AT91SAM3U MCUs

The enhanced Crossware suite allows developers using the AT91SAM3U MCUs to speed application development and to rapidly experiment with the SAM3U-EK evaluation board, understand the methods and techniques appropriate to the planned application and to make use of all the user friendly features that are provided within the Crossware environment.

Over 30 application examples are available demonstrating the use of the USB controller, the NAND flash controller, the SDIO/SDCard controller, the MMC controller and various other on-chip peripherals. FAT filing systems, USB mass storage devices, LCD, mouse and keyboard interfaces are all demonstrated. The application examples are imported into the Crossware environment in a structured way to make it easy for the developer to navigate through the source code and examine its operation. Stepping through the code in the source level debugger viewing registers, global and local variables, memory and stack trace allows further understanding of the operation of the code.

The Crossware Workspace Creator uses the ‘make’ file for the GNU versions of the Atmel examples to create a set of library projects and an application project. The appropriate command line options for the compiler, assembler and linker are determined and included in the build instructions. The environment strings for the projects are determined and used to allow the compiler and assembler to access header files across directories and the linker to access the library files created by the library projects. What would normally take hours of manual configuration is done in an instant.

The Atmel AT91SAM3U is the industry’s first ARM Cortex-M3 Flash MCU integrating high speed (480Mbps) USB Device-and-Transceiver, 4-bit 192 Mbps SDIO/SDCard 2.0, 8-bit 384 Mbps MMC 4.3 host and 48 Mbps SPI interfaces on-chip. The AT91SAM3U is uniquely suited to applications with intensive communications requirements, such as high-speed gateways in industrial, medical, data processing and consumer applications.

The Crossware ARM Development Suite runs on 32-bit and 64-bit Windows, features advanced C/C++ compiler, libraries, wizards, simulator and debugger, and provides a complete and extremely user friendly development environment for the ARM family of microprocessor cores.