RS makes good on commitment to Digital FAE role, with neat SEGGER-WAY into Debug support.

With Development Projects under ever-increasing budget and time pressure, R&D engineers are under the cosh to deliver quality and project specs within cost and on schedule. Semiconductor manufacturers’ development platforms are an excellent start for getting that “Golden reference” to test core chipset functionality and performance, as they enable hardware, software, and test teams to work in parallel from a known common platform. But they are only the starting point for the project.

While the hardware team develop a scale 1 prototype PCB, complete with the peripheral devices that will form the skeleton of the final system, the software and test teams face a significant problem. They can often only begin work once they have dev kit hardware and there is an old saying that ten times the software man hours are needed to get from prototype to final product release quality. To keep the project within timescale and budget and meet a market launch window, the software and test teams need to be helped to the finish line by fast and powerful debug tools.

Some recent development boards contain a simple debug facility, like the Infineon XMC ARM M0 microcontroller Boot kits See RS Stock No. (910-6848) , but Infineon also offer external J link debug modules from SEGGER to help their customers accelerate development See RS Stock No. (111-3727) . While platforms like Raspberry Pi based on Cortex A, use proprietary NOOBS environment and are potentially less useful for learning about debug, the broad range of micro cores that Segger support means that similar units targeted at different types of users from Students, and “makers”, though to professional developers, offer the more widely adopted J-link interface. An example is the Arduino style GR-SAKURAII-FULL based on Renesas RX63N (122-9827) .

New as of this week, searching the RS website for the SEGGER brand will return a comprehensive range of J link debuggers and flashers which, combined with the appropriate adapter accessory, support development and programming on the majority of the World’s microprocessors and microcontrollers. Supported silicon vendors include; Analog Devices, Atmel, Fujitsu, Infineon, Luminary Micro, OKI, Renesas, Silicon Labs, STM, Toshiba.

The Newest “J Link Pro” (131-1324) includes an Ethernet connection which allows the development board being debugged to be both electrically isolated and networked either hardwired or wirelessly. This gives whole teams of software engineers remote access to the board, from anywhere in the World enabling work to progress around the clock. The J Link Pro is the fastest product on the market, with up to 3Mb/s download speed, enabled by the use of TCP/IP - eliminating the delays associated with USB. The built in web server also enables simplified reconfiguration from the default DHCP settings. Furthermore, automatic core recognition and additional hardware status LEDs will delight both hardware and software teams by increasing what they can achieve in a day.

Project managers who hold budgets will also be pleased to know that while the J Link Pro is at the premium end of the SEGGER range it is the most cost effective way to work with host computers, running Windows, Linux or Mac OS X, and acquire licences for all the included software; J-Link RDI / RDDI, J-Link Unlimited Flash Breakpoints, J-Link GDB Server, J-Flash. Also, should any software updates come in future, they will be available to download free of charge from SEGGER and loaded to the debugger to keep it up to date - project after project - making it a copper bottomed investment.