The “M Profile” of the ARM architecture may very well be the 8051 of the 2010s as the Cotex M0, M3 and now the M4 cores are licensed by just about every silicon microcontroller makers. This presents a nice opportunity for us to provide our ICC compiler tools to the users. One of the nicest things about Cortex is that ARM Ltd. finally defined standard interrupt controller and system memory map so it’s much easier to port software between different Cortex devices from different manufacturers – well, at least that’s the theory. It may not be as rosy in practice

We have been quite busy here at ImageCraft. The V8 USB dongle is in production – we have the electronic parts made and we are waiting for the manufacturer to deliver the custom plastic casings. They should be released in mid to late June. We are now running a pre-production sale:  you can purchase the dongle for $49.99, instead of $60 when it is released. In the usability area, we have just added some MISRA C static checks to our V8 AVR compiler. MISRA (Motor Industry Software Reliability Association) C is a set of guidelines aimed to improve a program’s

We have moved the ImageCraft blog from wordpress to our own server. Product news wise, we are now finishing up the XGate assembler support for the CPU12 compiler. The XGate is an independent RISC processor available on some Freescale CPUS12X devices. It can offload a lot of tasks that otherwise would cause interrupts to the main CPU and degrade the main CPU’s performance. While Freescale’s main focus is in the automative and other industrial applications, the CPUS12 and follow-on series can still be quite useful in general embedded designs. The prices for the Freescale S12/S12X chips may be higher than