The latest release of Cyan Technology's CyanIDE Integrated Development Environment (IDE) enables users to configure their design for either of Cyan's eCOG 1k and µCOG 1m low power 16-bit microcontrollers. Version 1.2 of CyanIDE is part of Cyan's on-going strategy to maintain a single IDE for its expanding microcontroller range, thereby offering flexibility and cost-savings to the designer.
Traditionally, vendors require embedded systems designers to use a separate IDE for each series of microcontroller. Cyan's approach of maintaining a single IDE means that an existing design can be very easily configured for another of its microcontrollers, maximising code re-use.
CyanIDE 1.2, which is free and downloadable, also enables individual peripherals to be locked to the currently selected port, while allowing the others to float. The combination of CyanIDE and the microcontrollers' peripheral configurator enables the engineer to produce the optimum device pin selection to a given design. The ability to lock any peripheral in place ensures that this configuration may be preserved across future designs. This feature is ideal, for example, for making enhancements to an existing product or for brainstorming new product variants.
The benefit of CyanIDE and the associated Cyan microcontrollers is the ease by which their memory and peripherals can be configured. With a conventional microcontroller it can take many weeks to configure the on-chip peripherals and memory, often longer than the time taken to write the core application software. In fact many microcontrollers have documentation running to 300 or 400 pages but devote only 25 pages or so to the core, the rest concerns peripheral and memory configuration.
Used with Cyan's innovative on-chip Port Configurator, CyanIDE enables each peripheral to be configured very quickly for a particular application using a simple 'drag-and-drop' facility. In many instances this means that only one microcontroller is required to cover a number of different applications or features, the configuration of the microcontroller being changed in software at the time of testing. Thus time to market can be shortened significantly and upgrades or modifications can be made very quickly.
CyanIDE also uses a 'drag-and-drop' process for graphically configuring the MMU (memory management unit) whereby memory translation units are dragged and dropped on to a pictorial representation of the memory map. Logical and physical base addresses are entered and the segment size is selected from a drop down box. (Cache Mode configuration can also be set up). CyanIDE then automatically generates all the startup code necessary to utilise the selected MMU configuration.
CyanIDE, including a full ANSI C-compiler with no time or code restrictions, is available as a free download from www.cyantechnology.com
| Tel: | +27 11 728 4757 |
| Email: | [email protected] |
| www: | www.mbsiliconsystems.co.za |
| Articles: | More information and articles about MB Silicon Systems |
© Technews Publishing (Pty) Ltd | All Rights Reserved
printer friendly version