Atmel Studio 6 significantly reduces the cost of creating new designs because it is free of charge, provides professional-quality development tools, and comes with Atmel Software Framework (formerly called AVR Software Framework). With Atmel Software Framework, designers get a large library of well proven and free source code—including about 1,000 project examples. Using this code, design engineers can eliminate writing most of the low-level source code for their projects, significantly reducing time to market while maintaining high-quality solutions. The software framework includes a full set of drivers for on-chip peripherals and external components, wired and wireless communication stacks, audio decoding, graphics rendering, and fixed- and floating-point math libraries. For Atmel’s ARM processor-based microcontrollers, the library provides full support for the Cortex Microcontroller Software Interface Standard (CMSIS). Atmel Studio 6 currently supports roughly 300 of the company’s MCUs.



Faster product development cycles combined with reduced cost for on-chip Flash and the advent of faster MCUs are driving more design engineers to write code in C and C++, rather than in assembly code. Atmel Studio 6 makes it easy for engineers to write, build and debug their C/C++ and assembly code. Atmel Studio 6 also brings together, in seamless fashion, an editor with assisted code writing, a wizard for quickly creating new projects, a GNU C/C++ Compiler, a powerful simulator, and a front-end visualization tool for all of Atmel’s Cortex-M series and AVR processor programmers and in-circuit debuggers. The simulator, currently available for AVR designs, accelerates application development by providing an accurate model of the AVR MCUs. The simulator not only models the CPU and interrupts but also the on-chip I/O modules, allowing complete application development without the need for actual hardware.