IAR Systems supports new Freescale MCU families

PORTLAND, Ore. —Freescale's newest Kinetis, ColfFire and i.MX microcontrollers can now all use a common software development environment from IAR Systems, the company announced Tuesday (June 22).

Freescale said Tuesday that it is the world's first microcontroller maker to offer the latest ARM Cortex-M4 processor in its new line of microcontrollers, dubbed Kinetis. IAR Systems, (Uppsla, Sweden), the independent software development system supplier that is part of Intoi AB, simultaneously announced that it had ported its complete development environment to the new Freescale processor family.

Now IAR Systems supports all three of Freescale's microcontroller families—Kinetis, ColdFire and i.MX—with a common development platform. In addition, IAR Systems announced that it has collaborated with Freescale to provide a complete hardware/software development kit for Freescale's iMX multimedia processors.

The common software development environment includes full support for Freescale's MQX real-time operating system (RTOS), as well as USB host and device stacks, and a TCP/IP communications stack, according to IAR Systems. The IAR C-Spy Debugger works with the RTOS, making it possible to watch for example tasks, semaphores and mail boxes, according to the company.