Segger Microcontroller, founded in 1992, is a private company involved in the embedded systems industry. It provides products used to develop and manufacture four categories of embedded systems: real-time operating systems (RTOS) and software libraries (middleware), debugging and trace probes, programming tools (integrated development environment (IDE), compiler, linker), and in-system programmers (Flasher line of products). The company is headquartered in Monheim am Rhein, Germany, with remote offices in Gardner, Massachusetts; Milpitas, California; and Shanghai, China.

History

Segger Microcontroller was founded in 1992 by Rolf Segger in Hilden, Germany. The first product was the real-time operating system (RTOS), now named embOS. It was followed by emWin two years later. Initial products focused on RTOS and middleware products. However, the company later produced ISP-programming tools (Flasher) and debug probes (J-Link). In 2015, Segger introduced Embedded Studio, their cross-platform IDE for central processing units conforming to the ARM architecture, though recent versions are also used by RISC-V. All products are developed, maintained and updated in Germany except for Embedded Studio, which is primarily developed by a team of developers in the United Kingdom.

Product categories

Debug and trace probes

Segger is most noted for its J-Link family, which supports JTAG (Joint Test Action Group) and SWD (Serial Wire Debug) debug probes for microcontrollers that have older ARM cores (ARM7, ARM9, ARM11), ARM Cortex-M cores (M0, M0+, M1, M3, M4, M7, M23, M33, M85), ARM Cortex-R cores (R4, R5, R8), ARM Cortex-A cores (A5, A7, A8, A9, A12, A15, A17, A53, A72), Renesas RX, Microchip PIC32, SiLab EFM8, RISC-V. It is also repackaged and sold as an OEM item by Analog Devices as the mIDASLink, Atmel as the SAM-ICE, Digi International as the Digi JTAG Link, and IAR Systems as the J-Link and the J-Link KS. This is the only JTAG emulator that can add Segger's patented flash breakpoint software to a debugger to enable the setting of multiple breakpoints in flash while running on an ARM device which is typically hindered by the limited availability of hardware breakpoints. In the following table, the top group are trace devices, the bottom group are educational / hobbyist devices.