ARM Development Platform Serves Linux And Windows CE

Oct. 1, 2001

Getting hardware into the hands of software developers before a real product is available significantly reduces system development time. That's why Accelent Systems' Integrated Development Platform (IDP) makes a big difference to systems developers...

William G. Wong

The IDP uses a 206-MHz SA-1110 StrongARM processor with the SA-1111 companion chip. The 32-Mbyte onboard SDRAM is expandable to 256 Mbytes. An expansion bus is available for third party memory-mapped devices. JTAG debug support is included as well. The display is a four-wire resistive touch panel with a 1024-by-769 VGA screen. And, the IDP supports normal, suspend/resume, and soft-reset power modes.

This platform incorporates a complete line of peripheral interfaces, including 10BaseT Ethernet, USB host and client, IrDA, PCMCIA, Compact Flash, IDE, plus PS/2, and serial and parallel ports. Multiple audio interfaces include AC'97, I²S, and UCB 1200. This collection of hardware tends to be a superset of most IA designs, allowing developers to get up and running quickly. Accelent provides support for Windows CE and Linux.

Accelent's DeviceWare complements the standard operating systems with a system boot loader and device driver modules for all built-in hardware. The loader supports a variety of sources from the serial port to Compact Flash. The plethora of hardware and supporting software lets developers concentrate on application-specific development. Accelent actively supports new development tools, such as Microsoft's Talisker beta for Windows CE.

The IDP SA-1110/SA-1111 for Linux or Windows CE is $2995. Both operating systems are supported for an additional $400.

Accelent Systems Inc., 3480 W. Market St., Suite 105, Akron, OH 44333; (330) 864-2300; www.accelent.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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