Supports all features that previously relied on commercial IDEs.

Nordic Semiconductor announced that it has signed a licensing agreement for Embedded Studio with the German company Seger Microcontroller. Through this agreement, developers creating applications using Nordic's nRF51 and nRF52 series SoCs (System-on-Chip) can use Embedded Studio for free without any restrictions.

Embedded Studio is a complete all-in-one Integrated Development Environment (IDE) solution for managing, implementing, testing, and building embedded applications. This IDE features an excellent project manager, a source code editor, C/C++ GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) and CLANG/ compilers, an integrated debugger with an advanced debug info window and built-in Direct J-Link, and version control capabilities that are automatically built into the final application.

Although Nordic provides complete software solutions for its nRF51 and nRF52 series SoCs, it has relied on commercial IDEs until now for developing open-source IDEs or manual configurations. The nRF5 SDK supports commercial Keil and IAR IDEs, as well as the open-source GCC compiler.

However, when developing with GCC, you needed Eclipse (which requires customization to work with the nRF51 and nRF52 series), a free open-source IDE, or another IDE for writing and debugging code. Now that Nordic has acquired a license for Embedded Studio, developers using the nRF5 SDK can use a commercial IDE that supports all nRF51 and nRF52 series SoCs for free.

Support for the Embedded Studio IDE was added in the most recently released nRF5 SDK v14.1, and all examples are provided as Embedded Studio projects to enable rapid development. In addition to supporting Embedded Studio, the new nRF5 SDK continues to support Keil V4 and V5, IAR, and GCC projects, so existing users can continue developing using their preferred IDE.

"Nordic's powerful RF microcontroller family is now supported by Embedded Studio, the best cross-platform IDE that helps software engineers execute development processes more efficiently," said Seger CEO Ivo Geilenbruegge. "Our collaboration with Nordic has been ongoing for a long time, starting with J-Link OB support for Nordic Evaluation Boards, and we expect this agreement to be another important milestone."

Pål Kastnes, Technology Marketing Manager at Nordic Semiconductor, stated, "The addition of Embedded Studio support will be a significant turning point in making Nordic solutions easier to use," and added, "Embedded Studio includes all the features necessary to develop applications with the nRF51 and nRF52 series SoCs and features an intuitive user interface that makes it easy to get started with projects."

Kasnes also explained, "Since Nordic has numerous communities developing on macOS and Linux in addition to the Windows platform, cross-platform support was one of the key factors considered when evaluating a suitable IDE. However, until now, there have been limitations on using macOS and Linux that support nRF for free."