Picks and Pans

The Year of the ARM SOC

Seems like everyone and his brother is making an ARM SOC. I'll swear there are 50 different vendors making them. Do we need all of these? I guess so. Intel, Sharp, Fujitsu, Samsung to name a few. It is nice because each one seems a little different.

It's also nice because building a small embedded device which runs linux is now pretty much a commodity. Anyone can string up a cpu with some SDRAM and flash and make something pretty powerful. Amazing.

I'm trying it with a Sharp ARM chip. We'll see how it goes. One thing is for sure - I have great respect for cad operators who can layout a dense board quickly.

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

My vote for the cool SOC of the year (2003) is the Xilinx Virtex II Pro. It's a PPC 405 with a giant fpga. It's also a lot of IP which does all of the normal things like ethernet, serial, etc...

Maybe everyone knows this but looking over the interface docs I was having some major deja-vu from some work I did for IBM a few years back. It sure looks like the guts of the IP all came from IBM. Personally I like this because my impression is that IBM folks up in VT did a really nice job most of the time. (except for those odd PPC DCR registers - oh well, can't ask for everything)

Anyway, I've always been frustrated by this controller or that and always wanted to tweek things in the cpu/peripheral interface. Now it appears I can. We'll see... I plan to try.

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I've been doing some PIC programming lately. I really love Microchip's parts. Simple, cheap, effective. The 18F series is my current love. The 18F458 has lots of flash, a CAN controller, serial an a little RAM. I wired one up to a Cirrus 8900 ethernet chip and write a simple TCP stack for it. Amazing huh? Other have done this before me, but I was amazed how easy it was to do and how robust the part is.

Now I have a simple ethernet device which does serial, parallel, CAN for very cheap. Can't beat that.

Posted by Brad at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)