02 February 2010

Atmel & Micro Digital Out-Of-Box AT91CAP9 Solution

Atmel Corporation and Micro Digital, Inc., both members of the ARM Connected Community, have confirmed the immediate availability of a complete out-of-the-box board support package for Atmel’s AT91CAP9 starter and development kits.

In this complete solution, Micro Digital will provide the board support package, while Atmel provides the AT91CAP9 (CAP9) starter and development kits. Micro Digital software includes SMX RTOS, USB stacks, TCP/IP stack, File System, and WiFi support targeting the industrial and consumer markets to enable an easier, higher performing design.

Micro Digital’s SMX board support package offers turn-key AT91CAP9 (ARM9) support. Using the software package as an evaluation tool decreases programming costs and results in a more reliable end product. In addition, small size and high speed of the SMX RTOS reduces the bill of materials (BOM) cost and enables CAP9 to handle more demanding applications, the company said.

The core of SMX RTOS is the smx real-time multitasking kernel.  smxBSP for the Atmel AT91CAP9 processor family provides startup code and board support functions for MDI products and is included with smx. smxAware, also included with smx, extends the IAR debugger to display smx kernel objects, queues, and diagnostic information, as well as task, ISR, and LSR timelines, processor usage, and task stack usage. It also displays networking, USB, and file system information.

The smxNS TCP/IP stack is available for CAP9. An Ethernet driver for the CAP9 Ethernet controller provides turnkey TCP/IP support. A USB device controller driver for CAP9 provides turnkey USB device support using the smxUSBD USB device stack. smxUSBD permits connecting an embedded device to a PC, laptop, PDA, or other USB host as though it were a USB disk drive, USB serial device, USB HID, Ethernet device (RNDIS), or audio device, as required.

Atmel's CAP is a microcontroller-based system-on-chip platform with fast local memory, a wide range of industry-standard peripherals and interfaces, and a Metal Programmable (MP) Block that allows the designer to add custom logic.