Evaluation kit promises fast start on PowerPC

New from Applied Micro Circuits Corp, the Taihu is a low-cost easy-to-use evaluation kit for the company's PowerPC 405EP processor.

New from Applied Micro Circuits Corp, the Taihu is a low-cost easy-to-use evaluation kit for the company's PowerPC 405EP processor.

Developed for AMCC by Beijing UD Technology, the Taihu 405EP evaluation kit is the first product resulting from the strategic partnership between AMCC and UDTech, announced in October 2005.

AMCC will be demonstrating the Taihu 405EP evaluation kit on Booth 1802 at Embedded Systems Conference in San Jose, California, starting on 3rd April 2006.

To accelerate customers' system development time, the Taihu 405EP evaluation kit provides users with a comprehensive set of resources including a custom-designed evaluationboard, industry-standard software development tools, sample applications, system-level benchmarks and hardware design files.

The kit allows customers first to perform a comprehensive evaluation of the 405EP processor and then to use the base hardware/software design as a starting-point for their own product development.

"UDTech is proud to have produced the Taihu evaluation kit for AMCC", said John Liu, Vice President of Sales and Marketing at UD Technology.

"We believe that the kit provides an excellent evaluation platform for AMCC's customers, while also demonstrating UDTech's capability to perform high-quality engineering on an aggressive schedule".

The Taihu evaluation board is configured with the Linux operating system, but also provides the flexibility to load and run other PowerPC-compatible embedded operating systems.

Schematics and layout files for the board are provided so customers can start their designs from a proven baseline.

The board, with a 7 x 8in form factor, includes an AMCC 405EP processor operating at a clock frequency of 333MHz.

Other features include 128Mbyte of SDRAM, 32Mbyte of Flash, two 10/100 Ethernet ports, a USB 1.1 device port, a PCI connector, a Cardbus connector, a JTAG connector, a trace connector, Linux (2.6 kernel) in Flash, and U-Boot boot firmware in Flash.

"Enabling our worldwide customers to accelerate time to market by initiating early software development with the Taihu 405EP evaluation kit presents a significant advantage during the processor evaluation phase", said Mike Claassen, Technology Director at Avnet.

"The strategic partnership between AMCC and UDTech is already bearing fruit, and we eagerly await future innovative solutions created from this collaborative effort".

"We are pleased to introduce the first product resulting from our strategic partnership with UDTech", said Charlie Ashton, Director of PowerPC software at AMCC.

"The new Taihu 405EP evaluation kit provides an excellent platform for customers to evaluate the 405EP processor and then to start their software development early, without waiting for their own target hardware to be ready".

"We are delighted that our partnership with UDTech has produced a product with such compelling advantages for our customers and we look forward to future co-operation on PowerPC-based platforms".

Also included in the evaluation kit is kDiagnostics, a suite of advanced processor and board diagnostics from Kozio.

This diagnostics package, which can be licensed by customers, performs in-depth testing of the processor and evaluation board.

The Resource CD offers a wide range of sample applications that can be used as a starting-point for customers' software development, as well as various utilities to aid in system configuration.

The sample applications include a web server, telnet server, FTP server and example game, while the utilities provide a detailed configuration report on the board as well as utilities for setting the IP address and MAC ID.

Also included is an example Flash file system for persistent storage and a Linux root file system build environment.

The Resource CD also contains industry-standard benchmarks for use in processor performance analysis, including TTCP, DBench, Hint, Stream and MPEG-4.

These benchmarks allow customers to perform a detailed analysis of the 405EP processor's performance using standard metrics without having to acquire and configure the benchmarks themselves.

The kit software is provided to the user as source code as well as executables.

To assist customers in selecting the optimum development environment for their 405EP-based projects, evaluation versions of best-in-class software tools products from Denx Software Engineering, Embedded Toolsmiths and Green Hills Software are provided.

AMCC's easy-to-use 405EP evaluation kit is designed for customer setup in 15 minutes or less and is aggressively priced at $750.

The 405EP evaluation kit may be ordered from AMCC using part number EV-405EP-KIT-01.

Back to top