Product Introduction: USB Device Bootloaders

HCC has announced a range of Bootloaders designed for microcontrollers with USB device functionality.

HCC bootloaders are used to update and upgrade application code in a target device, either during product development or later on when field updates are necessary.

At the heart of the Bootloader is HCC’s portable Bootstub, which can work in as a little as 4K code space on an ARM7 processor. The Bootstub is intended to be fixed in the product, allowing reliable upgrade of an embedded device without any risk of overwriting or destroying the stub. During use, the Bootstub is used first to download the Bootloader from the host, after which the Bootloader downloads a body of new code, to which it then turns over control at completion of downloading.

On the host application side developers have several options for downloading to a new device. Free sample code can be provided that operates with libusb or with HCC’s USB Embedded Pipe. Alternatively the user can develop the application using a generic USB interface such as Winusb.

Supported targets include:
AT91SAM7x, AT91SAM9x, AT91RM9200, ISP1161, ISP1362, ISP1561, ISP1761 LPC214x, LPC23xx, LPC24xx, MAX3421e, MCF5222x, MCF53xx MPC834x STR7xx, STR9xx

BL-USBD-XXX can be provided as a working project on most standard tool chains including those from IAR, Keil, Metrowerks, Rowley and Tasking.