Unifying a fragmented market

The industry at large is suffering from the fragmentation caused by a vast amount of similar development tools with little differentiation. They all offer basic edit/compile/debug capabilities but often suffer from poor usability experiences due to the tool being less tightly integrated than a unified professional tool chain. Others may be locked to a single chip vendor which limits the breath of target support. The lack of standardisation often leads to duplication of efforts, code portability challenges and increased cost for middleware suppliers and development consultants.

For the first time, the ARM development community will be able to standardise on a completely free tool, with full commercial quality, no code size limitations, and not locked to a single microcontroller family or supplier. TrueSTUDIO Lite is based on an open standard tools platform of Eclipse/GCC/GDB and is extended and enhanced with modifications, getting started wizards and target support for ARM-based microcontrollers.

Magnus Unemyr, VP sales and marketing commented, “We believe TrueSTUDIO Lite fills a critical gap in the industry and will bring an end to the fragmented tools market. We firmly believe that developers and chip vendors alike will welcome it since it brings a standardised tool into the market that everyone can use and adopt. We’re also bringing a ‘software as a service’ subscription model into the high end embedded tools market which dramatically lowers any financial barriers to accessing the advanced capabilities of a professional tool chain.”

A standardised tool will benefit the entire community, not just developers. With developers using a single, free tool, microcontroller vendors will no longer need to commit huge resources to develop their own free tools with ‘me-too’ functionality. And additionally, middleware vendors will be able to reduce their porting and maintenance costs.

In combination with the launch of the free TrueSTUDIO Lite, Atollic is also introducing a low cost upgrade path to TrueSTUDIO Pro, the company’s flagship development tool which includes static code analysis, and advanced debugging capabilities such as event, data and instruction tracing, live variable watch, crash analysis and RTOS aware debugging. The Pro edition also includes full technical support. Developers will now have the option to add these capabilities with a low cost, ‘pay as you go’ subscription option.