Hi today with us is Ruth Rhodes. She is the Senior Product Manager for developer technology at Freescale Semiconductor. Ruth is going to talk with us today about the CodeWarrior development studio for Microcontrollers. So Ruth, what is CodeWarrior for the Freescale controller continuum?

Well, Freescale is unique in the industry and that they’re the only manufacturer that actually has Silicon from 8 bits all the way up to 32 bits. And so we do have CodeWarrior product for every single one of those architectures and up until last year it was a separate CodeWarrior product for each architecture. But when we made the decision that we wanted to develop the Flexis devices that is the twin parts, the 8 bit and the 32 bit parts, that actually have the same pin outs and also the same peripherals and the same tools. That meant that we had to actually take the ColdFire V1 support and move it into our O8 product. And so we developed the CodeWarrior for microcontrollers 6.O and so with that we made one step in the right direction. Well now we’re working on moving to the Eclipse IDE. And as we move there, our intention is to actually consolidate and move to the point to where we have one CodeWarrior for all the architectures. Now we can’t do it all at once and so it’s kind of, we’re moving slowly but surely. Later this year we plan on actually introducing a product that will have support for the RSO8s, the HCSO8s and then also the ColdFires V1 through V4 and then next year we will be adding new architectures.

So, today if I’m not using a Flexis device, can I still migrate between different devices?

Of course you can. One of the things that we did is the infrastructure that we put in place that allows you to move quickly and easily between the Flexis devices actually can be applied to all of the devices that are supported by the codewarrior microcontrollers 6.O. So you can move easily between an RSO8 to V1 or from an HCO8 to a you know a RSO8. So it gives you that flexibility because the same infrastructure that we put in place for Flexis actually applies for all the architectures that are supported.

So what specifically is it that makes it so easy to migrate?

Actually we introduced something that we call the MCU change wizard and with the MCU change wizard you can actually change or retarget your project in as few as 4 mouse clicks and so when you select the little chip icon here, what it actually does is it pulls out then a wizard that allows you to choose a new chip that you want to do your design with. So you go ahead and go in here and select exactly what device you want it to be. You also tell us what connection you’re going to be using with this new device and you tell it to finish. For mouse clicks, you just retargeted your project and so in the background CodeWarrior is reconfiguring your project with MU, our correct build tools so the MU assembler compiler linker and libraries that are required for the new device and then also the correct supporting files such as the start up code, the C header files, the vector table, and it updates also the derivatives dot H file which pretty much tells us which derivative you are actually doing your project design for. And then of course we you know if you have done your design with processor expert, you can actually go ahead and when you look at your project, we have added the new CPU bean into processor expert. And now with processor expert you select or make that the default that that’s the CPU you want and processor expert because of its database, is going to go ahead and go in and check and see if there are any things you know resources that you were using on the old chip that are no longer on the new chip and will help you then map that functionality into the resources on the new chip and go ahead and set everything up. Once you do that you generate the code again, recompile and you have just moved your project from one device to a new devoice.

So Ruth this sounds great. Where can customers get to download CodeWarrior and how much does it cast?

Okay. They can download CodeWarrior from the Freescale website. And so if they go to freescale.com/codewarrior/downloads, they can get any of the versions of CodeWarrior that are actually there. And for many of our versions of pr many of our releases of CodeWarrior we actually have special editions which are code limited but in the case of the CodeWarrior for microcontrollers, it actually covers most of the RSO8, main SO8 devices free of charge in the special edition.

Well that’s great, thanks so much Ruth.

Thank you.