Microcontroller gains free TCP/IP stack

Designers working with the novel eCOG1 ultra-low-power 16bit RISC microcontroller and CyanIDE development environment can now download a free TCP/IP stack from the Cyan website.

Designers working with the novel eCOG1 ultra-low-power 16bit RISC microcontroller and CyanIDE development environment can now download a free TCP/IP stack from the Cyan website.

This new release is part of a programme by Cyan to release software modules for the eCOG1 free of charge to developers working with this versatile microcontroller family.

Internet connectivity is a key feature that developers are often expected to incorporate into new products, whether they are designing toys or test equipment.

TCP/IP often requires memory-hungry, expensive microcontrollers to run a full implementation.

Now Cyan Technology has launched an eCOG1 version of the uIP Embedded TCP/IP stack.

The open-source uIP package is a memory efficient implementation of the TCP/IP stack, and this has now been ported to the Cyan eCOG1 ultra-low-power 16bit microcontroller.

The eCOG1 port of uIP TCP/IP contains the most commonly used features of the full stack, providing Internet connectivity for many embedded systems.

Benefits of TCP/IP include file transfer and updating (FTP), remote logging, web serving and remote control of embedded systems.

Applications will be found anywhere the Internet can be used as a means of connection to embedded devices, such as for flash upgrades, industrial control equipment monitoring, automatic meter reading, electronic point of sales and video phones.

The uIP stack includes implementations of TCP, IP, ICMP, ARP and a subset of UDP that allows unicast DHCP requests.

A device driver for the Ethernet controller SMSC LAN91C111 is also supplied.

The uIP stack is supplied with information on software integration, building and debugging on Cyan's eCOG1 development board.

A tutorial is also included on how to build a simple application based on uIP using CyanIDE, Cyan's unique development software.

A number of other sample applications are also included with the stack.

A dumper utility prints any Ethernet frame that is received through the network to the serial port.

A unit test for the SMSC91C111 Ethernet driver puts the physical layer block in loop-back mode, and sends Ethernet frames of all legal sizes.

The test verifies that the MAC layer sends and receives frames correctly, that the driver can handle all the legal frame sizes and receive overruns, and the driver can configure correctly both the MAC and the PHY blocks.

Of considerable value is the web server application, which demonstrates an implementation of an HTTP server.

It can serve web pages and files from a read-only ROM file system, and provides a very small scripting language.

The full software, together with an application note (No AN017) describing the eCOG1 port of the uIP TCP/IP stack and an implementation of the simple embedded web page server, can be downloaded from the Cyan website or can be requested on CD ROM.

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