The database behind the curtain

I looked at the Supported Devices page again today, and noted the paragraph at the top of the page which says:

“Following is a list of the ARM chips that are supported by the Keil development tools. If your specific device is not listed, please contact Keil, using the Device Database Problem Report and provide us with details so we may include your chip in a subsequent product release.”

A database! Hmmn….

I then scrolled down to the bottom of the page and saw something I had missed the first time:

A complete list of all supported devices is available at:

http://www.keil.com/dd/

Clicking this link made things worse! Now I had every vendor of every MCU known to mankind! Infinite choice (well almost). This wasn’t Subway for lunch; it was Subway for my future lifestyle!

But... top-left again there was help at hand. A sidebar called the “Device Database”. Perusing these links, I discovered that the list of MCUs that I had stumbled across wasn’t just a static page. It was a dynamically created page from the result of a database search. Wow! Now this was something to play with…

Further down the sidebar I found “Parametric Search”, which took me to a form here:
http://www.keil.com/dd/search_parm.asp

So here was what I wanted: A search engine on a database of over 1000 MCUs from a whole lot of vendors that let me enter my criteria for the MCU of my dreams. I filled out the web form and “Hey Presto!” there was a list of 9 MCUs that fit the bill.