The last few years have certainly been “exciting” times for the embedded industry. With the industry’s rush to adopt 32-bit architecture (by that I meant ARM, so the noun is singular on purpose), perhaps paradoxically it is clear that there will continue to be a market for 8-bit tools, at least for the next 5 years and longer. It’s the economy of scale and ease of use – when a 32-bit MCU is under a buck, so is an 8-bit AVR or PSoC and they have fewer pins to connect.
So ImageCraft will continue to concentrate on the 8-bit end such as the Atmel AVR and Cypress PSoC1. The Freescale CPU12 is still a darkhorse – over the years, it is consistently our second best seller after the AVR compiler. We just added assembler support for the XGATE (a coprocessor on some CPU12 devices) so hopefully customers will be using it to do interesting things. While the CPU12 devices are not in the lowest cost segment, it’s a solid high performance line that should have some years left in them.
We are currently finishing up the MISRA / lint checking code in the AVR compiler, to be released in Jan 2011. We see features like MISRA checks to be defining differentiators for us – features that allow our users to write more robust code faster. We look forward to continue augmenting our tools with these features.
And of course we are working on a Cortex M compiler. The ARM Cortex will take over the World, with some suitable definition for “the World.” The key there is ease of use. We are spending a lot of time to make sure that our debug solution is plug and play, and not plug and pray. We hope to release the Cortex compiler in H1 of 2011.
2009/2010 were sort of rebuilding years for us. The new CodeBlocks IDE is well received and now allow us to concentrate on our core competence of compiler building. The future is certainly brighter at the end of 2010 than the beginning of 2009. Lets hope for an even better 2011.
All The Best from all of us at ImageCraft.