Blackfin development board runs uCLinux

Edited by the Electronicstalk editorial team Aug 27, 2003

Kane Computing now has Blackfin DSP boards running uCLinux.

Kane Computing now has Blackfin DSP boards running uCLinux.

Metroworks has recently announced the beta release of its Blackfin 21535 uCLinux software port.

The development hardware used for producing this software is the Hawk-35, manufactured by Momentum Data Systems and sold in Europe by Kane Computing.

The Hawk-35 is a PCI-compliant plug-in board that provides a fully functional general purpose OEM hardware or software development environment for the Analog Devices ADSP-21535 Blackfin digital signal processor.

As well as the 300MHz, 600MMAC Blackfin, the board features a PCI 2.2 compliant interface, 32Mbyte SDRAM, USB connection, AC97 (AD1885) audio codec, large boot and data Flash (NAND), RS232 interface and an asynchronous memory expansion bus for peripheral development.

Kane Computing also offers the Eagle-35 platform for stand-alone development.

The Hawk-35 and Eagle-35 share the same hardware design, simplifying porting across different development environments.

The Blackfin DSP core is a highly parallel, pipelined architecture that allows users to achieve the most work possible per cycle.

For example, in one single execution cycle, the architecture supports: execution of a single instruction operating on both arithmetic units; execution of two 32bit data moves (either two reads or one read and one write); execution of two pointer updates; and execution of hardware loop update.

By processing so much information per cycle, Blackfin DSPs achieve very high-performance in the most intense signal-processing applications while minimising power consumption.

The Blackfin DSPs represent a revolutionary change to the traditional tradeoffs that programmers and system architects were forced to make in the past.

Blackfin DSPs incorporate the world's first truly high-performance DSP combined with MCU control functionality all integrated into a single architecture around which it is easy to develop a system.