June 20, 2012 -- IAR Systems AB today announced that its IAR Embedded Workbench high-performance embedded-development tool suite once again has been selected as the toolchain for ZigBee development.

Freescale Semiconductor has announced the Kinetis KW20 Wireless MCU and IAR Embedded Workbench is the supported tool chain for its alpha program. By enabling developers to run the ZigBee protocol stack on their Kinetis Cortex-M4 cores, Freescale enhances the level of capability developers can bring to wireless applications.

"Coremark benchmarks show that IAR Embedded Workbench provides the best optimizations for the K20 MCU," says Bruno Baylac, Director of the Metering, Medical & Connectivity Solutions division at Freescale. "Freescale acknowledges the importance of using high-performing development tools and their vital role in bringing products to market faster. By partnering with IAR Systems, with its outstanding technology and extensive code base, we are able to provide our customers with the tool chain that is best suited for leveraging the comprehensive capabilities of the K20."

IAR for ARM provides a complete development environment, integrated in a user-friendly IDE. The recently released version 6.40 introduces major feature enhancements including a new editor and source browser. It also adds outstanding optimizations, resulting in up to 40% faster code than for the previous version, on standard industry benchmarks.