[Icc-430] Product News

[Richard]

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 <http://www.imagecraft.com> 
<http://www.dragonsgate.net/mailman/listinfo>