Nordic Semiconductor adds Embedded Studio IDE support for nRF51 and nRF52 SoC development

Hong Kong, China, October 24, 2017 /ChinaNewswire.com/ - Engineers designing nRF51 and nRF52 Series Bluetooth Low Energy SoC applications now gain free access to SEGGER’s commercial Integrated Development Environment

Ultra low power (ULP) RF specialist Nordic Semiconductor ASA announces it has signed an agreement with Hilden, Germany-based SEGGER Microcontroller GmbH Co. KG to license use of Embedded Studio. The agreement allows developers to freely use Embedded Studio to develop Nordic nRF51 and nRF52 Series Systems-on-Chip (SoCs) applications without any limitations.

Embedded Studio is a complete all-in-one Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for managing, building, testing, and deploying embedded applications. The IDE includes: A powerful Project Manager; Source Code Editor; C/C++ GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) and CLANG/ compilers; an Integrated Debugger with advanced debug information windows and direct J-Link integration; and version control features for automatic deployment of finished applications.

Nordic delivers a complete software solution for its nRF51 and nRF52 Series of SOCs but until now these have relied on the use of either commercial IDEs for development or manual set-up of open-source IDEs. The nRF5 SDK included support for the commercial Keil and IAR IDEs as well as the open-source GCC compiler. When developing with GCC, either Eclipse, a free-of-charge, open-source IDE (requiring customization to work with nRF51 and nRF52 Series) or another IDE has been required for writing code and debugging. Now, with Nordic’s licensing of Embedded Studio, developers using the nRF5 SDK gain free access to a commercial IDE with full nRF51 and nRF52 Series SoCs support.

Support for the Embedded Studio IDE has been added to the latest release of the nRF5 SDK, v14.1. All examples are now available as Embedded Studio projects to enable a fast start to development. In addition to Embedded Studio, the new nRF5 SDK offers continued support for Keil V4 and V5, IAR, and GCC projects to ensure existing users can keep developing using their preferred IDE.

“The powerful Nordic nRF microcontroller family is now complemented by the best cross-platform IDE Embedded Studio which will help software engineers to be even more efficient in their daily development processes. It is another key milestone of our exciting long-lasting cooperation with Nordic, having originally started with the J-Link OB support for the Nordic evaluation boards,” says Ivo Geilenbruegge, CEO at SEGGER.

“Adding Embedded Studio is an important step in making our solutions easier to use,” says P#229;l Kastnes, a Technical Marketing Manager with Nordic Semiconductor. "Embedded Studio includes all the features needed to develop applications on the nRF51 and nRF52 Series SoCs and features an intuitive user interface easing project starts.

“Cross-platform support was one of the key things we considered when evaluating a suitable IDEs as we have a large community developing on macOS and Linux in addition to the Windows platform. Until now there has been a limited choice of easy-to-use, free IDEs for macOS and Linux with native nRF support,” says Kastnes.

"Nordic will continue to enhance the ease-of-use of its software solutions and will keep improving its design tools offering. Embedded Studio will make getting started with nRF51 and nRF52 Series SoC easier, while existing IDEs will continue to be supported. In addition, we will include tighter integration with tools like nRF Connect for Desktop to further enhance code development and testing."

About Embedded Studio
https://www.segger.com/products/development-tools/embedded-studio/

About nRF52 Series
tinyurl.com/nRF52-Series

About nRF51 Series
tinyurl.com/nRF51

About Nordic Semiconductor ASA
tinyurl.com/NordicSemi