[sdiy] Atmel releases Studio6

[Eric Brombaugh]

On Mar 4, 2012, at 7:40 AM, KD KD wrote:

> It supports Cortex M4! Time for ST to do something...

Looks nice. Now if Atmel would just sell a Cortex M4 part then maybe we could talk. The SAM4S16C appears to be the only one in the line and it's not available in the distribution channel yet. ST, Freescale, NXP and TI all have M4 parts for immediate delivery though.

This does raise a good point though - ST doesn't provide their own free development tools for their ARM Cortex M microcontrollers, but rather vectors you off to 3rd-party products. These are either expensive general-purpose professional-quality tools like IAR and Keil, or else reduced functionality demo versions invariably based on Eclipse/GCC. Nothing against any of these, but it would be nice to have something as clean and well supported as the Atmel tools are reputed to be.

Eric