December 14, 2009 – Uppsala, Sweden. IAR Systems today announced the availability of IAR KickStart kit for NXP LPC1114. This is believed to be the world’s first commercial starter kit for ARM Cortex-M0-based microcontrollers.

The strong partnership and tight cooperation during the development project between NXP and IAR Systems has led to IAR Systems latest starter kit being the first in the market.  One of the features which enabled the speedy development of this kit was the fact that the NXP LPC11xx Cortex-M0 family is 100% pin compatible with the NXP LPC13xx Cortex-M3 family.  “This kit is proof of that concept.  We were able to re-use 100% of the design from our recently released LPC1343 kit!” says Sara Skrtic, Development Kits Manager, IAR Systems.  Both the Cortex-M0, and Cortex-M3 processor families are supported by the new competitively priced IAR Embedded Workbench for ARM Cortex-M toolchain.

“Ease of development and migration path within the two compatible families is the main theme at NXP” says Geoff Lees, General Manager, Microcontroller Division, NXP.  He continues “We see this as true compatibility, not just peripheral compatibility between an older 8-bit core, and a different 32-bit architecture.”

“We are extremely pleased with IAR Systems’ commitment to our new Cortex-M0 family, and are very confident of their success with this kit.”

IAR KickStart Kit for LPC1114 contains all the necessary hardware and software for engineers to quickly design, develop, integrate and test Cortex-M0 applications. The NXP LPC111x family of devices are low-cost 32-bit MCUs designed for 8/16-bit applications and offer good performance, low power consumption, a simple instruction set and memory addressing together with small code size.

“We are very excited to have the first starter kit for NXP new family based on the ARM Cortex-M0 processor. NXP LPC1114 has a small footprint and very low power consumption; we believe that the new family will become very popular silicon on the embedded market” comments Fredrik Medin, Marketing Director, IAR Systems.

IAR KickStart Kit includes a development board fitted with the LPC1114 microcontroller, an 8K KickStart edition of IAR Embedded Workbench for ARM, and a 20-state evaluation edition of IAR visualSTATE.

The board also provides debug support through IAR J-Link-OB, a standard JTAG connector or a small SWD connector. The board is powered via the USB interface, removing the need for any external power supply. It also provides some user configurable devices such as a small LCD, buttons and LEDs, analog trim wheel, buzzer and a prototyping area. In addition, the UART pins are routed to a DB9 connector.

IAR J-Link-OB is a small board mounted JTAG/SWD debug interface that connects via USB to the PC host running Windows. It integrates into IAR Embedded Workbench and is fully plug-and-play compatible.

IAR Embedded Workbench is an Integrated Development Environment with a complete and easy-to-use set of C/C++ cross compiler and debugger tools for professional embedded applications. It contains project manager, editor, linker and librarian tools, C-SPYŽ debugger, full integration with IAR J-Link, complete upgrade path available from IAR Systems. IAR visualSTATE is a UML-compliant graphical design environment for reactive systems, with advanced formal verification and validation tools as well as a very powerful code generator.

IAR KickStart Kit for LPC1114 is priced at ? 100 / $ 139
IAR KickStart Kit for LPC1343 is priced at ? 100 / $139

More information about the starter kit can be found at www.iar.com.

Campbell, CA, December 14, 2009 – Mitrionics, Inc, the technology leader in FPGA-based hybrid computing, today announced that the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) High Performance Computing group has selected the Mitrion™ Accelerated Computing Platform to explore several projects designed to accelerate algorithms in different application areas.  Initial acceleration projects will focus on molecular dynamics, UAV on-board processing, genetic computations, elementary mathematical functions, and computational fluid dynamics.  To leverage the full potential of their existing FPGA-equipped computing system, QUT purchased the Mitrion Virtual Processor and Mitrion Software Development Kit (with Mitrion-C parallel programming language) as a rapid development tool to accelerate their algorithms.

“The Mitrion SDK is an important addition to our suite of high performance software development tools, making the potential benefits of reconfigurable computing and co-processing more accessible to our researchers at a lower programming effort,” said Dr. Neil Kelson, Research User Services Manager, High Performance Computing & Research Support Group, Queensland University of Technology. “Compared with traditional HDLs, our preliminary experience suggests that Mitrion-C will allow our users to more rapidly explore FPGA-based acceleration in a diverse range of areas, from vision and path planning in UAVs and robots, molecular dynamics analysis of nanoscale materials, to Computational Fluid Dynamics simulations.”

“Queensland University of Technology is recognized worldwide for its quality education and excellence in applied research for diverse industries,” noted Robert Wall, director of business development for Mitrionics, Inc.  “Mitrionics is excited to collaborate with QUT on their projects to accelerate applications for the benefit of their different departments and scientific users.”

The Mitrion Accelerated Computing Platform is designed to provide researchers and developers with the latest parallel programming tools for FPGAs that do not require any hardware design knowledge or experience.   The Mitrion Platform enables rapid development of new accelerated algorithms and applications in bioinformatics, computer-aided design, data mining, financial services, government/defense, and oil and gas industries.  Systems running applications accelerated using the Mitrion Platform generally perform 20x-100x faster than traditional systems while decreasing electrical power requirements by ninety percent.  

Mitrion SDK 2.0 – Accelerated Computing Platform 

The Mitrion SDK is a complete development environment for accelerating applications on FPGAs while making it easy for programmers to learn how to write software using parallel programming techniques that take advantage of the parallel processing capabilities of the FPGA-based Mitrion Virtual Processor. The SDK includes the Mitrion-C parallel programming language, a compiler targeting the Mitrion Virtual Processor, and graphical code simulator to identify programming errors, performance bottlenecks, and inefficient code.  Mitrionics offers a free SDK Personal Edition that supports Linux/UNIX, Windows and Mac OS X which can be downloaded from: http://www.mitrionics.com/?page=Downloads.

About the Queensland University of Technology

Based in Brisbane, Australia, QUT is a top Australian university with global connections and a reputation for quality undergraduate and postgraduate courses, a wide range of studies and applied research best suited to the needs of industry and the community. For more information, visit: http://www.qut.edu.au/

About Mitrionics

Founded in 2001 and privately held, Mitrionics is the technology leader in FPGA-based, software acceleration and hybrid computing.   The Mitrion Platform, which includes the Mitrion-C Compiler and Mitrion Virtual Processor, utilizes parallel programming and parallel processing to enable greater processing performance and a greener computing alternative.  The Mitrion Platform is unique because it eliminates the need for circuit design skills, thus making software acceleration accessible to scientists and developers all over the world. Mitrionics has key industry relationships with chip companies Altera, AMD, Intel, and Xilinx, systems vendors Convey, Cray, HP, and SGI, and module suppliers GiDEL, Nallatech, and XtremeData.  For more information, visit the company Web site at www.mitrionics.com, email info@mitrionics.com or call 408-395-3247.