From Software For DSP Fabrics To Open-Source IDEs

Dec. 5, 2003

A number of diverse announcements have rolled across the desk recently, starting with Motorola’s SCDMA module library for the MRC6011 Reconfigurable Compute Fabric (RCF) device...

William G. Wong

A number of diverse announcements have rolled across the desk recently, starting with Motorola’s SCDMA module library for the MRC6011 Reconfigurable Compute Fabric (RCF) device. The MRC6011 combines six RCF cores designed to deliver a peak performance of 24 G multiply-accumulates/s. The SCDMA module library addresses the joint detection uplink processing task, one of the most complex tasks in TD-SDCMA development. Software can handle tasks such as up- and down-link beam forming. The library works with the CodeWarrior development environment.

Motorola has kept busy with its development of the 150-MHz, PowerPC-based MPC5554 MCU. Targeted at automotive engine control, the MPC5554 incorporates a SIMD (single-instruction, multiple-data) instruction set. The MCU also has a high-speed ADC, 64 kbytes of SRAM, and 2 Mbytes of flash memory.

The MPC5554 includes an eTPU MCU designed to offload the PowerPC core by handling complex timing I/O. Debugging is improved with a Nexus 5001 interface. This ultimately enhances the JTAG interface with real-time debugging features.

Debugging embedded Linux got a little easier with Monta Vista’s revamped development called DevRocket. The new tools, based on the Eclipse open-source IDE platform, are part of the Monta Vista Linux Professional Edition 3.1.

The new edition includes an enhanced version of the 2.4.20 Linux kernel, including USB 2.0, IPv6, and VLAN support. The RTOS includes high-resolution POSIX timers and an O(1) real-time scheduler with CPU affinity support in multiprocessor environments. Many of these features will eventually be incorporated into the 2.6 kernel.

DevRocket comes with the GCC 3.3.2 GNU toolchain for C and C++ development. Pre-linking support was included for faster system startup. Monta Vista adds Eclipse plug-ins for platform image creation, system configuration, and target debug support. Monta Vista developed wizard’s streamline application and system creation. The Linux Trace Toolkit also comes as part of the bundle.

Motorola
www.motorola.com

Monta Vista
www.mvista.com

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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