IAR Systems acquires Signum to extend core technology for advanced processors

IAR Systems, the world’s leading supplier of software tools for developing embedded systems applications, has acquired Signum Systems Corp., a California-based vendor of hardware and software development tools for embedded systems. With the acquisition, IAR Systems complements its product offering with a broad series of high quality JTAG emulators, in-circuit emulators and debuggers. As a result, IAR Systems will have one of the market´s broadest offerings of development tools for the embedded industry.

Uppsala, Sweden—September 12, 2011— “More powerful processors and increasingly complex embedded systems are driving the need for more advanced tools for testing and debugging,” says Stefan Skarin, CEO, IAR Systems. “With its high competence, excellent technical support and world-class technologies, Signum is in many ways similar to IAR Systems, and exactly the company we want to team up with. We are determined to provide the best tool chain in the world-wide embedded market. By combining our technologies and know-how, our future product roadmap will be highly attractive to our large customer base and beyond”.

Signum supplies “JTAGjet”, a series of full-featured JTAG-based emulators, in-circuit emulators (ICE) and debuggers like the “Chameleon Debugger” to developers of microcontroller-, microprocessor-, and DSP-based systems. Supported devices include all ARM processor architectures: ARM7, 9, 11, ARM Cortex-M0, M1, M3, M4, R4, A8, A9, MPCore and Intel XScale. Signum also supports all Texas Instruments DSP processor architectures. Signum emulators and debuggers are sold worldwide and are designed and manufactured in the USA.
IAR Systems today ship thousands of units per year of their popular hardware debug probes IAR J-Link and IAR J-Trace. The new product portfolio of JTAG emulators is an addition to the existing portfolio of hardware probes.

Like IAR Systems, Signum has its strongest position in the fast growing ARM-based market. “The acquisition taps into our commitment to provide customers with reliable and powerful development tools for current and future ARM processors” said Stefan Skarin. “Many of our customers are standardizing their programming projects on IAR Embedded Workbench to vastly improve efficiency and time to market for new products. Customers who standardize their tool chain not only effectively reduce their costs today—they also boost their opportunities for next generation products."

About IAR Systems
IAR Systems is the world’s leading supplier of software tools for developing embedded systems applications. The software enables over 14 000 large and small companies to develop premium products based on 8-, 16-, and 32-bit microcontrollers, mainly in the areas of industrial automation, medical devices, consumer electronics, telecommunication and automotive products. IAR Systems has an extensive network of partners and cooperates with the world’s leading semiconductor vendors. IAR Systems Group AB is listed on NASDAQ OMX Stockholm. For more information, please visit www.iar.com

About Signum Systems Corp.
Founded in 1979, Signum Systems is a provider of high quality tools for embedded systems development. Signum JTAGjet emulators and Chameleon debuggers are sold worldwide and are designed and manufactured in the USA (Camarillo, California). For more information, please visit www.signum.com.