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-announce] 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 From richard at imagecraft.com Fri Aug 17 00:21:44 2007 From: richard at imagecraft.com (Richard) Date: Fri Aug 17 00:34:05 2007 Subject: [Icc-announce] CPU12 V7.03A released Message-ID: <200708170734.l7H7Y3Zj008551@dragonsgate2.imagecraft.com> V7.03A - August 17th, 2007 IDE/Compiler - Added "MIO Global Optimizations" to the Project->Options->Compiler tab. As MIO has not been fully tuned for the CPU12 target, please consider this as beta testing of this feature. As such, this is enabled for all versions. When released, MIO will only be enabled for the PRO version. Please notify us of any issues you may encounter while beta testing MIO. Compiler - Occsionally the compiler optimizer incorrectly removed an instruction - compiler was incorrectly using int to floating point conversion in the cases where it should be using unsigned to floating point conversion. // richard On-line orders, support, and listservers available on web site. [ For technical support on ImageCraft products, please include all previous replies in your msgs. ] From richard at imagecraft.com Fri Aug 17 17:49:27 2007 From: richard at imagecraft.com (Richard) Date: Fri Aug 17 18:01:49 2007 Subject: [Icc-announce] ICCAVR 7.14 Released Message-ID: <200708180101.l7I11mTo020464@dragonsgate2.imagecraft.com> From the readme excerpt 7.14 - August 17th, 2007 IDE - The support for FPSLIC devices were broken - The fix for the M644P starting address was lost due to a hard drive crash. Only affect 7.13A. - added Project->Options->Compiler->"Enable 64 bits double." This is for PRO version and in beta testing only. The runtimne code is VERY slow and excessive stack is used for functions returning double. This will be fixed at final 64 bit FP release. Compiler - MUCH better code for the following long operations: -- OR with constant with a single non zero byte -- AND with constant with a single non zero byte then compare against 0 Libarary - Added lib??atm128?.a, mainly for (s)printf for M128 bootloader programs. - Change EEPROM read/write functions so that the write waits for previous write to finish but return immediately after EECR strobe write. This improves performance and eliminate long interrupt disable time and is more watchdog and interrupt friendly. Header Files - New header files for mega325(0)p/48p..328p/329(0)p // richard On-line orders, support, and listservers available on web site. [ For technical support on ImageCraft products, please include all previous replies in your msgs. ] From richard at imagecraft.com Wed Aug 22 02:27:53 2007 From: richard at imagecraft.com (Richard) Date: Wed Aug 22 02:39:30 2007 Subject: [Icc-announce] ARM compiler 7.08 Beta0 Message-ID: <200708220939.l7M9dTF7079262@dragonsgate2.imagecraft.com> http://www.imagecraft.com/pub/iccv7arm_v708_beta0.exe Readme excerpt: 7.08 Compiler - Added #pragma fiq_handler func1 func2 ... These behave just like interrupt handlers except that they do not save and restore R8-R12 - Fixed a bug under Thumb mode where the compiler was emitting "add R?,#0" forever. Asm/Linker etc. - DCB directive with more than 253 characters (e.g. C char array initialization) was not processed correctly by the assembler. - First release of ELF native asm and linker. The assembler is now called iasarm-elf.exe and the linker is ilinkarm-elf.exe. DBG2Dwarf.exe is no longer needed to generate debug file. Currently some flash space is used for the extended debug info. This will be eliminated later. // richard On-line orders, support, and listservers available on web site. [ For technical support on ImageCraft products, please include all previous replies in your msgs. ]