CAMBRIDGE, UK, December 13, 2001 - Crossware (www.crossware.com), a leading embedded software tools developer, has added support to its 8051 Development Suite for the Philips and Atmel W&M (formerly Temic Semiconductors) 89C51Rx2 variant flash microcontrollers. This will provide programmers using these chips with an accelerated development environment and eradicate the need to purchase a separate in-circuit hardware emulator.

The 89C51Rx2 chips include up to 64 Kbytes of flash program memory, which can be reprogrammed by applications running in them. The Crossware system takes advantage of this reprogrammability by loading a small debug monitor into part of the flash memory. Once installed, this debug monitor works with the Crossware environment to provide full source level debugging. It will program the software into flash and then run it at full speed whilst allowing the user to halt its execution at any time and single step or trace through the code watching it perform.

The Crossware environment will also simulate the reprogramming protocol, thereby enabling programmers - developing software that re-programs the on-chip flash - to fully test it using simulation before running it with the hardware.

All on-chip peripherals are simulated and graphical views of the programmable counter array and watchdog timer are provided. The Atmel W&M chip includes 2 Kbytes of data EEPROM and programming of this is simulated too.

Running under Windows, Crossware's 8051 Development Suite includes a full-featured ANSI C compiler, a relocatable cross-assembler, an advanced overlay linker, a state-of-the-art source level simulator that can be extended to simulate a complete target system, and debug tools which support source level debugging on the target system itself. A wide range of microprocessors from Dallas, Cygnal, Atmel and Philips are supported.

All of these integrate into Crossware's Embedded Development Studio development environment to bring together an extremely powerful and easy to use tool set, which can be used to develop and fully debug 8051 programmes both with and without hardware.

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