Applied Micro Circuits Corporation announced the availability of Arches, an Advanced Mezzanine Card (AMC) form factor dual-processor reference design kit for its Power Architecture 460GT processor. The kit is a key component in the company’s comprehensive strategy to support Advanced TCA. Arches provides developers with options for hardware, software, development tools and connectivity interfaces and it represents the company’s direction to help accelerate time-to-market by creating a healthy product development ecosystem for its AdvancedTCA customers.
AMCC will share its technical expertise, leverage its co-development efforts with industry-leading partners and demonstrate the Arches reference design during the AdvancedTCA/MicroTCA Summit and Exhibition, Oct. 21-23 in booth #304, at the Santa Clara Convention Center.
Ashton will be one of three company executives who will share insights about the latest in ATCA advancements during conference. He will discuss accelerating the development of high-performance AMC processor cards during a seminar entitled “Bringing in Advanced TCA and MicroTCA Projects On-Time and On Budget” on Tuesday, Oct. 21 from 1:40 p.m. to 5:20 p.m.
Arches is an Advanced Mezzanine Card (AMC) industry-standard solution supporting systems based on Serial RapidIO (AMC.4), Gigabit Ethernet (AMC.2), and PCI Express (AMC.1) interconnects.
To accelerate customers' development time for AdvancedTCA and MicroTCA systems, AMCC's new reference design kit provides users with a comprehensive set of resources including: a custom-designed board in the AMC form factor, industry-standard software development tools, open-source middleware for interprocess communications from Enea, a leading RapidIO network management and diagnostic tool from FETCorp, system-level benchmarks, and a complete hardware/software design package.
The Arches kit allows customers first to evaluate the PowerPC 460GT processor in an ATCA environment and then to use the turnkey hardware/software design as a starting-point for developing their own product, adding as much or as little custom design as appropriate for their product goals.
The Arches card, conforming to the standard single width mid-size AMC form factor (180mm x 74mm x 17mm), is a solution developed for AMCC by Silicon Turnkey Express. The card design includes two AMCC PowerPC 460GT processors, each operating at a clock frequency of 1.0GHz. Other hardware features include 1GByte of DDR2 SDRAM, 128MBytes of NOR Flash, 1GByte Micro-SD flash, two serial ports on the front panel, two 10/100/1G Ethernet ports on the front panel, four 10/100/1G Ethernet ports on the AMC connector, x1/x4 Serial RapidIO port on AMC connector, x1/x4 Serial RapidIO/PCI-Express port on AMC connector, a shared JTAG connector, and two trace connectors. The flash image includes Linux 2.6 kernel and U-Boot boot firmware, along with a file system that incorporates the RapidFET configuration software as well as the open source LINX interprocess communications (IPC) framework developed by Enea, plus a range of AMCC-developed sample applications, benchmarks and utilities.
To assist with the processor evaluation phase, the Resource CD included in the kits contains industry-standard benchmarks for use in processor performance analysis, such as TTCP, DBench, HINT, STREAM and MPEG-4. These benchmarks allow customers to perform a detailed analysis of the processor’s performance using standard metrics without having to acquire and configure the benchmarks themselves. Also included is a custom security benchmarking environment that measures the performance of the on-chip security engine on standard security algorithms. Once customers progress to the software development phase and before their own target hardware (prototype board) is available, the Resource CD offers a wide range of sample applications that can be used as a starting point for customers’ software applications, as well as various utilities to aid in system configuration.
The sample applications include a web server, telnet server, FTP server and an example game, while the utilities provide a detailed configuration report on the board as well as utilities for setting the IP address and MAC ID.
The new reference design kit Arches complements AMCC’s twelve previously-introduced, easy-to-use evaluation kits, including the Glacier 460GT evaluation kit. AMCC's extensive range of PowerPC evaluation kits is based on clear objectives to provide customers with easy-to-use platforms for processor evaluation and software development. Each of the kits can be set up quickly, facilitated by a clear, step-by-step Getting Started guide and user-friendly configuration software. The dual-PowerPC 460GT reference design kit is based on the same user-friendly concepts as the rest of the family, while adding new system-level solutions to further enhance customers' experiences.
To assist customers in developing their own system software based around the Arches platform, an Embedded Linux Development Kit (ELDK) CD from Denx is included in the kit.
AMCC, www.amcc.com
