The creation and consumption of cool gadgets has become a way of life for many designers, engineers, and billions of consumers. These gadgets, whether for music, video, Web navigation, games, or communications, keep getting ever more sophisticated, smarter and smaller.

As I mentioned in another article, ARM Cortex-M3 is not compatible with ARM7TDMI in interrupt, ISA, bus structure and JTAG protocol (SWD). You have to upgrade ARM7TDMI tools to support Cortex-M3 microcontrollers. After a small research, I summarize following tool related information for your reference.

Freescale offers various custom devices for important customers. In order to reduce the cost for SoC customers, Freescale has licensed its PowerPC 440/405 to Xilinx.

ColdFire integrated enhanced multiply accumulate (eMAC) unit as a fundamental function block. Many algorithms of DSP processing and cryptography heavily rely on add and multiply operations, which can be boosted with MAC and eMAC.

I have not checked PMP market since I purchased my last player. The market is changing so quickly. Today I am impressed by the brand new MID-like PMP (Smart Q5/Q7) by Zhiqi, China.

On Board Diagnostic (OBD, it is also called Enhanced OBD in European) is installed in many vehicles for on board self-diagnostic and reporting purpose. OBD systems give the owner or a technician access to the state of health information for various vehicles.

Various servers are installed for different purposes: Network Attached Storage (NAS), RADIUS, Network Access Server, web server, FTP server, mail server, VPN server and IP-PBX server. Most of the servers are built upon x86 platforms.

Have you ever experienced virtual devices before? Most of the software development for mobile phone is developed in a dedicated simulator.

Freescale has an interesting product line: embedded MCU plus power, MM908Exxx. It is a combination of analog features such as high side and low side switches, H-bridge stepper motor drivers using SMARTMOS technologies with Freescale standard flash microcontroller (HC08/HC12) in a single package.

Before Freescale released the Kirin3, it has offered an Ethernet enabled microcontroller MCF5223X, Kirin2e. There are two major differences between Kirin2e and Kirin3. The Kirin3 adds USB-OTG module, but it removes Ethernet PHY.

Freescale offers many documents for its latest connectivity microcontroller Kirin3, MCF52259. I believe most of the people will start to evaluate the labs without reading the documents. I am one of these guys who hate reading documents.

Freescale offers complementary MQX RTOS suite for its ColdFire microcontroller with full source code. Although the software is deliveried in source code, it is highly recommended not touching source code in the component level.

The Kirin3 demo kit presents 6 labs for evaluation purpose. All of these labs cover from command shell, TCP/IP, USB host application and Task Awareness Debugging, which are based upon a complete ecosystem presented by Freescale and ARC/MQX.

ColdFire Kirin3 is a microcontroller, rather than a microprocessor. As a result, Kirin3 can not run Linux or uCLinux which have complete TCP/IP, IrDA and Bluetooth stacks.

More and more semiconductor providers have released new microcontrollers with ARM CORTEX-M3/M0 cores. It is time to review the new product lines and check out their advantages over most successful ARM7TDMI microcontroller.

Ada is a programming language developed for USDoD (United States Department of Defense). The name was named after Ada Lovelace (or Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, 1815-1852), who is often credited as being the first computer programmer (without a real computer).

The default firmware shipped with the M52259DEMOKIT and M52259EVB is Web HVAC, which allows people to view and control HVAC via a standard web browser. It is the 4th lab project in the series of demo projects prepaired for the MCF52259 connected microcontroller. 

It is quite difficult for a designer to select a suitable one from hundreds of microcontrollers for his project.

An address decoder is used to split the address apace into smaller one for specific purposes. The address decoder is unnecessary in some cases.

Mr. P has rich experience in software development for PC. He was involved in a digital audio project for an audio file generator module.

Wireless routers are very cheap and have been widely deployed in SOHO and public WiFi hotspots.

Simulation tools have developped to the system level for many years. Actually system level simulators are powerful enough to communicate with external world via TCP/IP and many native interfaces (RS232, Bluetooth, USB).

Freescale offers a USB bootloader for its Kirin3 (MCF5225x) connected microcontroller. It offers a convenient approach to upgrade the firmware. It is not a USB host bootloader, but a USB mass storage device (MSD) bootloader.

Let us explore how to install a full Debian distribution on an emulated ARM926 machine with QEMU.  The consumer now have alternative choices for their devices. On the other hand, the developers can leverage the native compiler coming with the ARM Linux distribution to build their projects with less effort. No more cross-compiler is necessary now. You can also setup a build farm to speed up your native build with distcc.  The development requirement is almost identical to the desktop system.

Software emulators have great value for the software developers who are focusing on high level application software.