FPGA Module Sports PowerPC

Feb. 16, 2004

Operating as a standalone device or as part of a PC/104 system, MenMicro's EM04N embedded module handles a 400-MHz MPC8245 Kahlua II PowerPC and a 250-kgate Altera Cyclone FPGA. These devices are well suited for control and other environments...

William G. Wong

The EM04N's small-outline dual-inline-memory module (SO-DIMM) slot handles up to 256 Mbytes of DRAM, a CompactFlash slot, a pair of RS-232 ports, and a pair of Fast Ethernet ports. A starter kit includes a carrier card with the FPGA configured for an 800-by-600 graphics controller, CAN controller, four UARTs and a serial-peripheral-interface bus (SPI bus), integrated-development-environment (IDE) interface, and static memory and general-purpose I/O controllers. It supports Linux, VxWorks, and QNX.

Pricing for the EM04N embedded module starts at $540.

MenMicro www.menmicro.com

See associated figure

About the Author

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

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I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

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