Some users may be familiar with the Atmel Software Framework, or ASF, from previous releases of Atmel Studio. At that time, however, it only supported Microchip AVR microcontrollers, it now supports both AVR and ARM processor-based microcontrollers from Microchip. ASF comprises a high-quality software library with drivers, communication stacks and common services. These provide an abstraction layer to the hardware and high-level middlewares. The framework is integrated into Atmel Studio or is available as a standalone for GCC and IAR compilers. It has been developed with quality and reliability in mind, so the customer can safely ship products that make use of ASF in the final version; plus everything is downloadable for free. With ASF, it is easy for developers to migrate applications between Microchip MCUs and to develop mixed 8- and 32-bit applications. In fact, it works with over three hundred microcontrollers across all Microchip ARM Cortex-M processor-based, AVR UC3, and AVR XMEGA devices, on both GNU and IAR compilers.