Kits speed cPCI development

Silicon Concepts has announced hardware and software tools to speed development of 32bit, 66MHz CompactPCI/PCI systems and adapters.

Silicon Concepts has announced hardware and software tools to speed development of 32bit, 66MHz CompactPCI/PCI systems and adapters.

The kits support the PCI9056 I/O accelerator chip and GBP32 GigaBridge switched PCI controller chips from PLX Technology.

Each kit includes evaluation hardware, reference designs and necessary interconnect cables, and includes fully featured software application development tools supporting real time and enterprise systems.

The CPCI GBP32RDK-33 hardware development kit supports the PLX Technology GigaBridge GBP32, allowing developers to create systems such as remote access concentrators, switches and routers, multiple host fail over systems, wireless base station controllers and enterprise storage systems, where scalability and high reliability are the dominant parameters.

The development kit includes two reference boards, each featuring a GBP32 chip with associated software tools, allowing designers to begin development of a two-node GigaBridge adaptive switch fabric by using the two M-Link cables included with the kit.

Each board features a large prototyping region, allowing developers to add custom circuitry to address specific design requirements.

The adaptive switch fabric can be scaled up to 224 nodes by adding further adapters and cables.

Developers may interconnect adjacent backplanes by installing GBP32-based CompactPCI adapters into a host system as a peripheral device and a target backplane segment as a system controller.

The CompactPCI 9056RDK-860 and PCI 9056RDK-Lite are rapid development kits that enable designers to take full use of PLX Technology PCI 9056 I/O accelerator chip.

The PCI 9056 is the industry's first bus mastering PCI silicon to enable 32bit, 66MHz designs in a full range of embedded CompactPCI/PCI systems and adapters.

The CompactPCI 9056RDK-860 is the industry's first PCI reference design kit to feature 66MHz external bus support for the widely used Motorola MPC 850/860 PowerQUICC processor.

The board is built to PICMG 2.0 R3.0-compliant CompactPCI 6U form factor, and includes 64Mbyte SDRAM, 8.5Mbyte Flash and 4Kbit serial EEPROM.

An onboard CPLD memory controller with 512Kbyte synchronous burst SRAM, 10/100Mbit Ethernet port, dual RS232 serial ports, MPC860 BDM debug port and PLX option module (POM) further aid rapid development.

The kit also includes the PLX Technology SDK Pro v3.4 software development kit, which facilitates application code development for use in enterprise and real-time software platforms such as Windows XP and VxWorks.

VxWorks board support packages (BSPs) are included, as well as Windows XP drivers for all PLX I/O accelerator chips.

SDK Pro v3.4 also provides host side support comprising Windows 98/Me/NT/2000/XP and Linux host drivers, APIs and libraries, enabling developers to rapidly establish communication with PLX I/O accelerator devices across the PCI bus.

This enables developers to write host and local side software for any PLX I/O accelerator device.

The PCI9056RDK-Lite supports designs using the PCI9056 with generic 32bit local bus devices.

The kit is preconfigured for demultiplexed generic address/databus operation, and is easily reconfigured for multiplexed address/databus applications.

The PCI v2.2 form factor evaluation board also includes 32 surface mount footprints for hardware designers to easily add processors, DSPs, ASICs, FPGAs, memory and I/O devices to test, simulate and debug designs without fabricating custom boards.

Software development is supported by the SDK-LITE v3.4, included with the RDK.

This is a Windows host-side-only version of SDK Pro v3.4, which provides the same Windows drivers, APIs and libraries but does not include VxWorks support.

Both SDK Pro v3.4 and SDK-Lite v3.4 include pSOS RTOS support for the PCI9054 I/O accelerator.

Each kit includes the Jungo WinDriver device driver development toolkit, which provides system designers and software developers with a complete environment for developing high performance 66MHz PCI and CPCI telecomms and networking products based on the PCI 9056.

The hardware development kit CD-ROM provided with each kit includes Orcad schematics, layout and source files, Gerber output files, bill of materials, Verilog source code for the CPLD memory controller and the PCI9056 databook.

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