Date: 17/04/2012

New IDE Dave3 for Infineon's XMC4000 microcontroller chips

Infineon Technologies has announced the development support for its XMC4000 industrial microcontroller family. The DAVE 3 integrated development platform environment is now downloadable from the website www.infineon.com/dave.

The environment includes an auto code generator based on DAVE apps, a free GNU compiler and a free debugger including flash loader. Infineon provide further specific development tools, including compilers, debuggers, software analysis and flash programming; software solutions; training and consulting services for the recently launched XMC4000 family that uses the Cortex M4 processor from ARM.

"Infineon put a lot of thought into DAVE 3 to facilitate and shorten software development for our customers," said Dr. Stephan Zizala, senior director, industrial and multimarket microcontrollers at Infineon Technologies AG. "With our free-of-charge DAVE 3 developers can efficiently use the innovative, application optimized peripherals via a graphical user interface."

DAVE 3 is a free, eclipse-based software development platform for the XMC4000 family. It includes a free tool-chain and supports automatic code generation thus facilitating the use of predefined and tested software components, the so-called "DAVE Apps". In contrast to the typical current tools that offer libraries and code examples, the DAVE Apps are more abstract, allow graphical combination of several DAVE Apps and enable automatic, conflict free mapping to the available hardware resources of the chip. Along with the free DAVE 3 also the first 28 DAVE Apps are downloadable to support Ethernet, TCP-IP and file system applications, data integrity and encryption/decryption solutions. The first set of DAVE Apps also includes PWM generation support, various counter and timer use cases, clock configuration, interrupt handling and DMA (Direct Memory Access) configuration. Further DAVE Apps will be released continuously; they will cover a wide range of low level and middleware applications including free real-time operating systems that support the CMSIS RTOS API (Application Programming Interface).

As DAVE 3 is an open platform it allows flexible extensions and adaptations. In addition to the free compiler, linker, debugger and flash loader, there will be plug-ins from commercial tool-vendors available. Consequently the users can stay with their preferred IDE while fully utilizing the autocode generation functionality of DAVE 3.