ARM chip family update?

Chris_MIRA · Post by **Chris_MIRA** » Thu Jun 18, 2015 1:21 pm

Is there any future intent to increase the range of ARM chips supported by Flowcode, perhaps the cortex A8 range?

Regards,
Chris

CeesD · Post by **CeesD** » Thu Sep 03, 2015 9:12 am

As enthousiastic FC user timely support for ARM Cortex M4 is very important, too my opinion. The Cortex M-family is becoming the standard in embedded products. One of the important reasons is that it is not a single source product. We think that the market for FC licenses could be much larger when the Cortex M-family can be handled.
Any news could restore or ruin our hope to once use FC for this chip.

Post by **Benj** » Thu Sep 03, 2015 10:30 am

Hello,

We are currently investigating the possibility of using the ST range of ARM devices within Flowcode as well as PIC32. It's a big job but it looks possible.

Mantas · Post by **Mantas** » Tue Sep 22, 2015 9:07 pm

I don't understand why you just don't go for the atmel sam3s or sam4s chips? Apart from cmsis library and AIC replaced by NVIC the library for the remaining peripherals is almost identical...this would mean that the upgrade would be fast and easy, plus the legacy products could be upgraded with new chips as they are pin to pin compatible...of course I no longer using FC, for the same reason, that ARM support was terrible, and even the sam7s chip support was underdeveloped. Nevertheless I loved FC, it's a wonderful software for rapid prototyping, but at the same time it has huge limitations in debugging and the produced code was way too heavy and far from optimized. Anyway I moved on, but I wish all the best to Matrix team, they are doing fantastic job out there, but it seem they are a bit too short on man power to bring new stuff quickly to their customers.

Best regards,
Mantas

Post by **Benj** » Wed Sep 23, 2015 9:49 am

Hi Mantas,

From our research the Atmel ARM chips just don't seem that popular. We put a lot of our eggs in the Atmel Arm basket before and got badly burnt. The break down of Flowcode sales rank Arm as by far the least popular platform. The default Arm bootloader from Atmel woudn't even work on 64-bit machines for years due to lack of a driver so we ended up writing our own.

The ST Arm chips on the other hand are very low cost to buy and seem to be very popular and well supported by ST so these are the devices we are aiming for going forward. We have big plans for Flowcode 7 so make sure to check back around the release date

wayne millard · Post by **wayne millard** » Wed Sep 23, 2015 12:56 pm

HI Benj,

What else can you do to flowcode 7?

Wayne M

Mantas · Post by **Mantas** » Wed Sep 23, 2015 5:33 pm

Hello Ben,

I realy hope you can pull this off...just if you do, go for the new harcore Cortex-M7! 300MHz CPU with double precision FPU! It's a beast! I'm planning to get my eval board to test them, and I realy hope they can handle one of my complex real-time floating point math algorithms at high speeds, because the previouse ones just couldn't

Both ST and Atmel have their range of M7's, so if you are planing to release the new line of ARM chips, go for the newest ones so they would last!

And also one remark...pls don't try to make one flowcode for PIC16's and Cortex-M7, as one or the other will suffer greatly. It's like for example with USB support, PIC chips are well supported but AVR and ARM chips do not posess this functionality (or at least they didn't last time I checked it). I hope you understand what I mean. And also, if you are planning to support such chips, make sure you support JTAG/SWI debugging tools, as these are a MUST for ARM chips! Best of luck with the development of FC7

Best regards,
Mantas

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ARM chip family update?

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