Opensource IDE / Toolchain

Jeevan,

Your students can use CCS's free license with any of the launchpads or hdk's... the license works as long as they are using the lower performance emulator but to be honest in most cases this is perfectly ok performance. Only gets a little painful when downloading a full 4MBYtes of flash to an RM57L843 for example...

There is a GCC compiler distributed w. CCS that is an alternative to the TI ARM compiler but it doesn't officially support the Cortex R... it should work 'ok' if you stick w. little endian RM4x or RM5x devices., Big endian ARM GCC for the TMS570 series is usually where people have to put in more effort.

I don't know of any completely 'open source' IDEs. CCS is an eclipse plugin but itself is not open source. So if the issue is studying the CCS innards it won't do what you want I'm afraid.

If the issue is just free licenses than I would absolutely recommend CCS and a launchpad as the lowest cost of entry about $20-$30 per student.

If you think you can roll your own hardware locally for less you could also do that and use the XDS100v2 emulator reference design which is freely available - to use all your own hardware.