[July 02, 2009] IAR Embedded Workbench Helps Drive Power Savings for Atmel's picoPower AVR32 Family Tweet Jun 30, 2009 (Close-Up Media via COMTEX) -- IAR Systems announced the availability of support in IAR Embedded Workbench for Atmel's recently announced picoPower AVR32 UC3L microcontroller family that features a built-in hardware capacitive touch controller. IAR Embedded Workbench makes use of the single-cycle load/store and DSP instructions in the AVR32 UC core. Together with optimization intelligence in the compiler, the generated code will require a minimum of memory space while running applications with per-cycle throughput. The code generated by the IAR Embedded Workbench allows the microcontroller to complete application tasks using fewer clock cycles, thereby conserving power. In addition, smart scheduling and register allocation performed by the compiler avoids power consuming load/store operations. For a typical application utilizing sleep mode, the companies noted, the optimizations in IAR Embedded Workbench reduces the execution time by up to 30 percent, and consequently lowers overall power consumption by as much as 30 percent, the company said. Oyvind Strom, Atmel's director for AVR32 products noted, "With the AVR32 UC3L family Atmel has created the world's first picoPower 32 bit MCU. Atmel is very pleased to see that the advanced compiler technology from IAR Systems utilizes the picoPower features built into the MCU to further reduce the power consumption and to deliver the true low power system performance." IAR Embedded Workbench also includes the built-in IAR C-SPY debugger it is possible to make profiling of the application using trace data recorded from execution on hardware. The profiler uses trace data to display how the code executes on function or instruction level, and where in the application clock cycles are spent. It helps the developer to focus on problem areas and discover if the application unnecessarily spends time in active mode. The trace features in C-SPY can be used together with the Avrone! Debugger probe, available from Atmel. Profiling can also be done with the built-in instruction set simulator, the groups noted. The integrated capacitive touch controller in the AT32UC3L is supported by the Atmel's QTouch Library, and is also available for IAR Embedded Workbench. It can be downloaded from Atmel's web site. ((Comments on this story may be sent to [email protected])) [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]