IDE comes free with MCU development board

Cyan Technology's new, low cost microcontroller evaluation board comes complete with the company's patented CyanIDE integrated development environment.

Cyan Technology's new, low cost microcontroller evaluation board comes complete with the company's patented CyanIDE integrated development environment.

Selling for only Eur 60 (GBP 42), the combination enables rapid development, configuration and debugging of the Cambridge-based company's 16bit eCOG1k microcontroller.

Paul Barwick, Cyan's Sales Director commented: "While other suppliers may offer low cost development and evaluation kits, none offer free of charge a complete suite of software tools, including a full ANSI C-compiler which is not code or time limited".

"Furthermore, our board has an on-chip debug facility making additional hardware unnecessary".

The 3.5in (90mm) square board is powered by the USB, and so there is no need for an external power supply.

The board features USB-based debugging and a second USB channel is available for serial or parallel I/O user applications up to 1Mbyte/s.

The board also contains two RS232 serial interfaces, eight switches and coloured LEDs along with four potentiometers for use with the analogue inputs.

All processor pins are brought out to 0.1in headers.

Cyan's eCOG1k and uCOG1m low power microcontrollers are based on a Harvard RISC core developed by Cambridge Consultants.

Both feature a large number of on-chip peripherals and the 8mm square, 81-pin uCOG1m claims the highest peripheral density of any comparable product.

Both microcontrollers deliver high performance at a fraction of the power used by standard devices.

Using a single-instruction prefetch queue, the microcontrollers boast performance of up to 25MHz to easily accommodate the 16bit routines required by many communications applications.

In addition to offering a complete, easy to use development environment with editor, project file manager, time and code unlimited ANSI C compiler, simulator, debugger and in-system programmer, CyanIDE 1.1 includes a patented peripheral configuration tool.

Using a simple "drag and drop" facility the designer selects the peripherals by dragging them onto a screen image of microcontroller.

The chosen peripheral is then simply "right clicked" to display and set up its properties.

Code for the configuration file is then automatically generated and built as part of the project.

Paul Barwick commented: "Customer feedback is confirming our strong belief that CyanIDE can save developers vast amounts of time on peripheral configuration".

"Some have estimated time savings of up to eight weeks over that which might have been expected with traditional microcontrollers and IDEs".

Back to top