IAR Systems claims world's first starter kit for ARM Cortex-M0

The strong partnership and tight cooperation during the development project between NXP and IAR Systems has led to IAR Systems latest starter kit being the first in the market. One of the features which enabled the speedy development of this kit was the fact that the NXP LPC11xx Cortex-M0 family is 100% pin compatible with the NXP LPC13xx Cortex-M3 family. This kit is proof of that concept. We were able to re-use 100% of the design from our recently released LPC1343 kit! says Sara Skrtic, Development Kits Manager, IAR Systems. Both the Cortex-M0, and Cortex-M3 processor families are supported by the new competitively priced IAR Embedded Workbench for ARM Cortex-M toolchain.

Ease of development and migration path within the two compatible families is the main theme at NXP says Geoff Lees, General Manager, Microcontroller Division, NXP. He continues We see this as true compatibility, not just peripheral compatibility between an older 8-bit core, and a different 32-bit architecture.
We are extremely pleased with IAR Systems' commitment to our new Cortex-M0 family, and are very confident of their success with this kit.

IAR KickStart Kit for LPC1114 contains all the necessary hardware and software for engineers to quickly design, develop, integrate and test Cortex-M0 applications. The NXP LPC111x family of devices are low-cost 32-bit MCUs designed for 8/16-bit applications and offer good performance, low power consumption, a simple instruction set and memory addressing together with small code size.

We are very excited to have the first starter kit for NXP new family based on the ARM Cortex-M0 processor. NXP LPC1114 has a small footprint and very low power consumption; we believe that the new family will become very popular silicon on the embedded market comments Fredrik Medin, Marketing Director, IAR Systems.

IAR KickStart Kit includes a development board fitted with the LPC1114 microcontroller, an 8K KickStart edition of IAR Embedded Workbench for ARM, and a 20-state evaluation edition of IAR visualSTATE.

The board also provides debug support through IAR J-Link-OB, a standard JTAG connector or a small SWD connector. The board is powered via the USB interface, removing the need for any external power supply. It also provides some user configurable devices such as a small LCD, buttons and LEDs, analog trim wheel, buzzer and a prototyping area. In addition, the UART pins are routed to a DB9 connector.

IAR J-Link-OB is a small board mounted JTAG/SWD debug interface that connects via USB to the PC host running Windows. It integrates into IAR Embedded Workbench and is fully plug-and-play compatible.

IAR Embedded Workbench is an Integrated Development Environment with a complete and easy-to-use set of C/C++ cross compiler and debugger tools for professional embedded applications. It contains project manager, editor, linker and librarian tools, C-SPY® debugger, full integration with IAR J-Link, complete upgrade path available from IAR Systems. IAR visualSTATE is a UML-compliant graphical design environment for reactive systems, with advanced formal verification and validation tools as well as a very powerful code generator.