07 October 2009

Atmel Kit Speeds Development On ARM9-Based Embedded MPU

Atmel Corporation, a member of the ARM Connected Community, has unveiled its SAM9G45-EK valuation kit to support application development on its 400 MHz ARM926-based embedded microprocessor (MPU) with DDR2 memory.

The SAM9G45 offers 480 Mbps EHCI-compliant high-speed USB with on-chip PHY, Ethernet and SDIO for high-speed connectivity, plus LCD and touch sensing for intelligent user-interfaces (iUIs), and programmable 1.8 or 3.3 V I/O supply voltage implemented in a high-data bandwidth architecture with a dual EBI, the company said.

The evaluation board can be used to evaluate the performance benefits of the SAM9G45’s dual external bus architecture, with two separate banks of 128 MBytes second-generation Dual Data Rate (DDR2) memory, each of which is connected to an external bus interface. Onboard flash memory includes 2 Gigabytes (GB) of NAND flash and 32 Mb (2M x 16) flash memory, which can be used to store the firmware uploaded in the DDR2 memory at system boot or application data.

Onboard peripherals include a high-speed (HS) USB host/device port, a second HS USB host port, an Ethernet 10/100 interface, two high-speed SDCard/SDIO/MMC slots, a 24-bit color WQVGA LCD TFT display with resistive touchscreen and backlight, composite video output, camera interface and a backup battery.

The SAM9G45 board offers dual boot capability, supporting Linux and Microsoft Windows CE, with a pre-programmed demo showing the basic programming functionalities available under Linux and WinCE. Atmel provides full BSPs for both operating systems free of charge.

The SAM9G45 evaluation kit is available now.