《Beyond the IDE》.pdfVIP

Beyond the IDE Introducing a platform to facilitate reliable and highly productive embedded developments Author: Joerg Bertholdt, Director of Marketing, MCU Tools and Software, Atmel Corporation Beyond the IDE Software plays an increasingly dominant role in the success of an end product as the processing capability of embedded systems increases. Developers working on enterprise or web-based software have benefited from integrated tools dealing with software complexity for year, a requirement that is now strongly emerging for emerging, microcontroller based products. As microcontroller (MCU) vendors have integrated more functions into their platforms, embedded developers realize they need to achieve higher levels of productivity, which can only be achieved with increasing the degree of code reuse. Marketing continues to demand faster responsiveness from engineering as the need for an agile development operation is firmly linked to an organization’s success. Moving to a new MCU may involve downloading new support code archives and documentation and learning new APIs. Code that would otherwise be identical still requires rewriting because of changes in the application programming interface (API) between MCU versions. However, this is problematic in an environment that requires scaling and tuning on the fly in order to react quickly to changes in demand. In today’s complex and feature-rich embedded developments, a comprehensive MCU software framework and a method of easily integrating additional software libraries and tools are becoming increasingly more important for design teams. Software Frameworks In the enterprise application development, frameworks are now very popular and have enabled programmers to re-use common algorithms and functions for various projects. However, it is not until recently that designers have realized the true advantages of frameworks, and the approach for embedded development frameworks is just becoming established.