From richard at imagecraft.com Tue Aug 14 03:05:24 2007 From: richard at imagecraft.com (Richard) Date: Tue Aug 14 03:17:37 2007 Subject: [Icc-430] Product News Message-ID: <200708141017.l7EAHXTL058581@dragonsgate2.imagecraft.com> With all the developments going on, sometimes it is hard to keep track of things. There is also some rumors that we are emphasizing certain compilers less etc. so hopefully this email will also address some of those concerns. Obviously, we are in the business to make money, I have always believe that by providing excellent support, a decent development toolset, plus the low cost factor, that we would be able to make a decent living. I see no reason to change from that philosophy. ImageCraft is relatively speaking a small company, but then again, so is the embedded tools market. A million unit a year gadget may only need one copy of the compiler for development! This is a challenging market. There are gazillions devices out there, each with a potential market of only a few thousand compiler licenses in total at best. With multiple fishes in the pond, the feeding can get thin indeed. Then you have brilliant silicon manufacturers who think that it is in their best interest to have their own software tools, not caring that it is an effective way to drive away their third party tool vendors. So we have to adjust. We have to look at the potential markets and react, we have to change our development team setup, we have to look ahead and come up with effective strategies and tactics. Given this light, the last thing we want to do is to abandon our existing markets. While we believe the growth markets would likely be the AVR and ARM, there is no reason not to continue to develop for the HCS12 and MSP430 platforms. Especially with the new generations of the S12X and MSP430X devices coming in, the market potential is bigger than ever. But we need to be smarter. May be we should look into educational kits with detail examples and an easy to use board bundles. Perhaps we need to add more companion products such as a RTOS. May be we need to be more aggressive in making sure users pay for the annual maintenance.... Of course, coming from a techie background, most importantly, we have to continue to improve on our technologies. The MIO global optimizer is working well and we have come up with a plan to improve the performance further. We need to implement features like __far and __flash to support certain chip features better (paged function under S12 and flash items under AVR), and we need to deliver the 64 bits FP support. And we need to widen the net farther. We are very excited about the new Parallax Propeller chips. 8 32 bits core on a single chip. While it is not a microcontroller per se, the chip has a lot of potential. A Propeller C, which is under development, is potentially huge. Beyond that, the Atmel AVR32 is a natural target for us, and we have new resources with Eclipse expertise so we would be able to leverage the Studio32 platform from day one. Oh, BTW, relating to that, we will be releasing an AVR Studio plugin for ICCAVR soon and users than can use one single IDE for the AVR platform. All these take human, monetary and time resources. It is a challenging road we have chosen, but I am confident that we are set up to succeed. I thank you all for the support you have given us over the years. I hope this is useful information and I welcome any comments and suggestions you may have, either on the list or to me privately. Thank you. // richard