Date: 04/03/2012

Atmel's IDE studio 6 supports ARM Cortex and AVR MCUs

Atmel Corporation has introduced Atmel Studio 6, the latest version of its popular integrated development environment (IDE) that now supports both Atmel 32-bit ARM Cortex-M series processor-based and Atmel 8/32-bit AVR based microcontrollers (MCUs).

The company also announced an aggressive expansion of its Atmel SAM3 ARM Cortex-M3 processor-based MCU family with 40 new devices, delivering more scalability, cost-efficiency and connectivity for a broad array of applications, including industrial automation, smart grid, and building and home control. Throughout this year, the SAM3 and SAM4 families will quadruple the Atmel Cortex-M series processor portfolio to nearly 200 ARM processor-based MCUs, and include devices with on-chip memory densities of up to 2MB Flash, 192KB of SRAM and extensive peripherals, such as high-speed USB host and device with on-chip physical layer (PHY), Ethernet and dual CAN.

"We're pleased to offer the design advantages of the Atmel Studio 6 IDE to the ARM community, whose engineers can now enjoy the ease of use and seamless integration with other toolsets that our AVR MCU development community has long experienced. With a user base of more than 100,000, our IDE is clearly proven and highly appreciated among AVR designers, so it was only natural for us to extend the environment to support all Atmel MCUs and enable the ARM application developers," said Vegard Wollan, vice president, microcontroller and touch business unit, Atmel Corporation. "Furthermore, by expanding our SAM3 family, we are delivering the first phase of significantly expanding our ARM Cortex-M processor-based MCU offering, providing the ARM community with more choice to meet their unique design requirements."

"We welcome Atmel's expansion of their Cortex-M series processor-based MCU portfolio," said Keith Clarke, VP, embedded processors, ARM. "The availability of 40 new SAM3 devices, together with free Atmel tools and software support, is welcome news for developers aiming to bring Atmel's ARM Cortex-M series processor-based devices and applications to market quickly. Atmel's offering further underlines the popularity of the ARM architecture."

Atmel Studio 6 is available as a beta release, free of charge, and can be downloaded at www.atmel.com/atmelstudio. It is 100% backwards-compatible with AVR Studio 5. The IDE supports currently available AVR and SAM3 Cortex-M3 processor Flash-based MCU evaluation kits.

Production volumes of the new SAM3 devices are shipping now.