$6 SAM9 processors feature Conexant soft modem

To develop with the Atmel SAM9 CPUs, you need to be able to load a bootloader, U-boot, the kernel, and a filesystem on the built-in flash on your dev board (or your own hardware). While you can use U-boot to load a kernel and filesystem into flash, you still need another tool to load the bare-metal bootloader, and U-boot itself. With the SAM9s, the tool Atmel provides is a POS called SAM-BA (no relation to the SMB/CIFS package for Linux).

The problem is that SAM-BA really doesn't work in Linux, and strangely enough, also doesn't work in Windows 7, unless you're using the cr@ppy 32-bit version for some reason. You need to have access to an old, obsolete Windows XP computer so you can run SAM-BA and load these images. If your PC doesn't have a serial port, have fun messing around with USB-CDC or USB-to-serial drivers in XP and getting all that to work.

Atmel has done a terrible job of providing development tools to support these CPUs.

Dont know about anybody else but I have no problem running a couple of noname USB serials on an XP VM on a Linux host. I use them everyday for communicating with my Dataman S4 chip burner and assorted other ancient development gear, granted the driver that came with them on the CD doesnt work but a quick download of the latest driver worked a treat.

Plus if the windows driver doesnt work you can use a little bonus trick of running on a Linux vmware host of having vmware treat the USB serial as a normal serial port which XP supports out of the box and let the Linux USB serial driver do all the hard work admittedly this does take a wee bit of work doing but it does work.

I do a lot legacy hardware work and Serial and LPT ports are a normal part of my diet and I find using VMware to host legacy OS's make my job significantly easier.

It may well be that this SAM-BA is even worse than you think.