Development Suite Adds Support for New Atmel Device

Developers using Atmel's latest flash microcontroller, the AT89C51RE2, can now employ Crossware's 8051 Development Suite to get programs up and running quickly and efficiently. Crossware has added support for the AT89C51RE2, which comes with 128 kbytes of flash program memory, to the totally integrated and GUI-based suite. The company also enhanced the suite with "register tool tips." When the mouse hovers over a value in a register view, the tips pop up and display the name of the register and list by name all of its bits and the value of each bit. The development suite includes an ANSI C compiler, a re-locatable assembler, a source-level simulator that can be extended to simulate a complete target system, and a debug monitor that supports source-level debugging on the target system itself.

The 8051 Development Suite includes extensive support for the features of the new processor. The graphical Code Creation Wizards will generate code for all of the microprocessor's on-chip peripherals, including a programmable counter array, three timers, two UARTs, a watchdog timer, and a serial peripheral interface. The Wizards also will generate code to configure external memory and produce interrupt handlers. The code produced for the PCA, timers, UARTs, and watchdog timer can all be tested with the simulator as well as on the processor itself. Other notable features include the ability to simulate the extended stack pointer, enabling programmers to wrap the internal RAM stack of the AT89C51RE2 into the first 256 bytes of xdata RAM. In addition, the debug monitor allows source-level debugging on target hardware with full support for banked flash and unlimited software execution breakpoints, which speeds debugging.