Crossware enhances ARM development suite with support for Atmel AT91SAM9263
(Technology News, 08 Jan 2008 )
Crossware has enhanced its ARM Development Suite by adding support for the Atmel AT91SAM9263 ARM-based microcontroller.
The Crossware enhancements allow developers to rapidly exploit the advanced features of this chip by providing a combination of wizards, simulation, debugging, compiler extensions and pre- configuration. This allows the developer to immediately take advantage of the advanced C/C++ compiler and other tool chain components and simplifies the otherwise complex task of setting up an the AT91SAM9263 chip—thereby accelerating the development process and significantly reducing new product time-to-market.
The Atmel AT91SAM9263 chip, based upon the ARM926EJ-S processor core, features a wide range of on-chip peripherals including timers, serial interfaces, an Ethernet controller, host and device USB interfaces, an image sensor interface, an AC97 audio interface, an LCD controller and multimedia card interfaces. It also features an external bus interface together with a static memory controller, error corrected code controller (ECC) and an SDRAM controller.
A feature of the AT91SAM9263 is the on-chip boot ROM which searches the external bus for applications in a range of locations such as an on-board NAND flash chip or an attached DataFlash card. If an application is found, it is copied into SRAM, which is then relocated to the boot address, and the application starts.
While this feature is very useful for a completed application, it is not particularly suitable for the initial development and debugging phases of a project. Therefore if the Crossware debugger detects that this boot method has been attempted, but failed, it will automatically relocate SRAM to the boot address prior to downloading the application. The developer is therefore to able to bypass this boot process and immediately debug the application in SRAM and also SDRAM.
Alternatively, the AT91SAM9263 is able to ignore the on-chip boot ROM and boot conventionally from, for instance, NOR flash located at address zero. The Crossware debugger is able to detect this and automatically program the application into flash memory ready for immediate debugging.
Crossware’s Code Creation Wizards are provided for all on-chip peripherals and many are able to generate configuration code, interrupt routines and, for the USARTs, complete I/O handlers. The simulator simulates the ARM core itself as well as many of the AT91SAM9263 on-chip peripherals including the advanced interrupt controller (AIC) and the peripheral DMA controller (PDC). This allows a developer to use the simulator to immediately test the code created using the wizards. The simulator can also be extended using the Virtual Workshop Interface allowing developers to construct a simulation of their complete target system.
