ARM & Embedded Linux Craigslist

If you are going to roll your own ARM, check it out! Going to approach the ASSP SoC IC design service and push the chip via foundry, your own custom ARM chip could be very expensive. Since we are talking about custom SoC design based on ARM and FPGA, take in consideration the following suppliers.

 

 

Combining logic, memory, and a processor core, Altera created the industry's first embedded processor FPGA solution that allows engineers to integrate an entire system on a single device. Altera's processor portfolio includes Excalibur™ devices that offer integrated processor subsystems and the configurable Nios® embedded processor for Altera® FPGAs.

 

 

 

 

The V5IP-7000 is a complete ASIC/SOC logic emulation, prototyping and IP development/verification system. The V5IP-7000 base board is populated with one Xilinx Virtex-5 LX330 FPGA, supporting peripherals, IO, and power distribution. Up to six additional LX330 (or LX220) modules can be plugged into the high-speed connectors of the base board to significantly extend the platform's FPGA gate density.

The V5IP-7000 platform is designed to support AMBA AHB 2.0 and 3.0 AXI for ARM926EJ-S, ARM1136JF-S, ARM11MPCore, and ARM1156T2F-S Core Tile. These modules can be stacked on the based board or/and FPGA add-on LX330/LX220 modules.

In addition to the ARM add-on Core Tile modules, the "Video (DVI , Cameralink)", "PCIe/Cardbus ", "Debug (Mictor Logic analyzer", and " ADC/DAC 4CH ADC (125MSPS)" modules are also available to further extend the flexibility and functionality of the V5IP-7000 platform.

 

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. By combining the performance, density and low power consumption of the fixed portion of the device with the flexibility of the MP Block, CAP enables application-specific products to be developed in a fraction of the time and at a fraction of the cost of standard cell ASICs, but at a unit price close to that of standard cell devices. Atmel's CAP is based upon ARM7TDMI and ARM926EJ-S cores.

 

 

Actel is taking the design of real-world systems to a new level, offering designers the capability to quickly implement their applications using the industry's only ARM-enabled, mixed-signal FPGA. In addition, Actel has put in place an expanded design infrastructure to support the single-chip ARM-enabled Fusion devices, which contain the soft ARM7 processor CoreMP7 in a version of Actel's award-winning, mixed-signal Fusion Programmable System Chip (PSC).

 

 

 

A Chinese doctor candidate announced his own ARM7 clone IP on opencores. However on web page, the detail will not be revealed until some issues are sorted out.

After implementation these soft-core or hard-core of ARM processors, you can either put them into foundry service after some clean up, (it sounds easy, actually not) then you can have your own ARM SoC business.
 

 

 

Design on ARM (Hardware Tools)

Debugger
ARM LPC2xxx HITEX DEVELOPMENT TOOLS

 

U-Link U-Link and U-Link II from Keil, using Cypress EZ-USB as USB-JTAG bridge, very cheap in its clone version;

 

 

 

 

IAR J-Link is a small USB-JTAG debug probe for ARM processors.

 

 

 

 

Micetek offers JEDI JTAG debugger for ARM and PowerPC. Sorry the page is written in Chinese.

 

 

Signum offers JTAGjet ARM tools as well.

 

 

 

 

Dominic Rath's Open On-Chip Debugger

 

 

 

 

Tobias Lorenz's gdb-jtag-arm

 

 

 

 

Amontec's Chameleon JTAG Pod and JTAGKey USB JTAG tools

 

 

 

Macraigor tools, Cheapest Wiggler JTAG, using parallel port, now all new notebook PC have removed the EPP and RS232, so U-Link is recommended.

 

 

Olimex ARM-JTAG Dongle - A Wiggler-compatible parallel port JTAG

 

 

 

 

iSYSTEM Development Tool Solutions do support a wide range of ARM based microcontrollers.

 

 

 

 

Programmer

Basically JTAG can be used to both debugging and programming purposes. However you have to pay more attention if you are looking for bench programmer for poduction purpose and programming on-board external falsh memory, which means you have to get driver from your programmer suppliers.

BPM Microsystems' flash memory programmers.

 

 

HiLo programmer, marketed in Japan and US/EU as name of tribalmicro.

 

 

 

 

Advin gang programmer.

 

 

 

 

 

Evaluation boards and starter kit

Please check independent starter kit page.

Design on ARM (Software Tools)

Compiler

 

ARM offers many tools, now ARM aquired Keil and passed the software tools to Keil.

 

 

 

 

Keil™, an ARM® Company, makes C compilers, macro assemblers, real-time kernels, debuggers, simulators, integrated environments, evaluation boards, and emulators for ARM7/ARM9/Cortex-M3, XC16x/C16x/ST10, 251, and 8051 MCU families.

 

 

 

IAR Embedded WorkBench C++ compiler and debugger for ARM

 

 

 

 

Metrowerks is a subsidary of Freescale, its CodeWarrior is quite famous in embedded world.

 

 

 

 

HighTec was founded in 1982, then as a two-man operation. From these modest beginnings the company has grown over the years to its present size employing more than 20 highly qualified computer scientists, engineers, physicists and mathematicians. Our range of products includes GNU-based compilers as well as the realtime operating system PXROS.

 

GNUARM offers off-the-shelf compiler toolchain based upon GCC. GNUARM has 3 derivates for Cygwin, Linux and Mac.

 

 

CodeSourcery's Sourcery G++ is a complete development toolchain for the ARM architecture, based on the GNU Toolchain. Sourcery G++ includes the GNU C/C++ Compilers, the Eclipse IDE, and many other utilities.

 

Lineo Solutions, Inc. is a leading embedded solution provider with a core technology in embedded Linux operating systems, including cross development tools and environment, software/hardware reference designs, and professional services. Lineo’s embedded solutions bring about OEMs faster time-to-market with the most practical and productive methods that are strongly desired at the actual embedded product development scene. As a representative example, Lineo uLinux is on Sharp Zaurus SL-C3000.

 

Raisonance has developed, in co-operation with STMicroelectronics, a comprehensive toolset for the STR7 family, based on the ARM7 powered 32-bit Flash Microcontrollers.

 

 

 

 

 

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Other Software Tools

"startEasy for ARM" Secure And Easy Start of ARM Projects

 

 

 

SWARM - Another ARM simulator

 

 

 

 

Altium Limited (ASX:ALU) is a leading developer of unified electronic product development solutions. We make software that electronics engineers use to develop the products that are so much a part of our everyday lives. From car dashboards, life saving medical devices, washing machine controllers through to space satellites, Altium's software has enabled electronics engineers, designers and developers to create more intelligent and innovative electronics faster.

 

GrammaTech develops and markets static-analysis tools. Our flagship product is CodeSonar, a source-code analyzer that identifies serious bugs at compile time.

 

 

 

 

 

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GUI

Swell Software is the leader in embedded GUI development tools and provides customers with high quality GUI software that significantly reduces development time. Our PEG® products were created to fill a void in the existing software tools industry by providing a graphical user interface solution created specifically for use in embedded systems. Our complete solution includes embedded GUI development tools that work tightly with real-time operating systems, C/C++ compiler suites and reference platforms. PEG® products have been licensed worldwide in thousands of embedded systems serving such markets as communications, medical instrumentation, industrial controls including Fire/Security, POS, VoIP, Factory Service and Maintenance Systems, & consumer electronics. Our customer base includes many of the worlds largest OEM's who utilize our software in creating the most innovative and successful products available.

Tilcon Software Ltd.,is a leading manufacturer of embedded graphical user interface (GUI and HMI) and graphics software used extensively to rapidly prototype and develop demanding graphical interfaces for embedded devices in industrial, medical, defense, automotive, consumer and gaming applications. Tilcon has enabled device manufacturers to quickly bring to market state of the art and fully custom graphic displays that perform within the constraints of real-time and embedded environments.

 

Embest IDE for ARM is a complete solution for embedded arm development. This software kits provide a modern 32-bit Windows-based C Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that hosts the entire development process in one location (available for Windows 98/NT/2000/ME/XP).

Microcross is the leading international distributor of open-source embedded development tools based on GNU technology. Microcross is making embedded systems easier to program by providing full-featured, open-source development tools that are validated and documented, so customers can affordably accelerate their development.

StackAnalyzer automatically determines the worst-case stack usage of the tasks in your application. The analysis results are shown as annotations in the call graph and control flow graph. Stack memory has to be allocated statically by the programmer. Underestimating stack usage can lead to serious runtime errors which can be difficult to find. Overestimating stack usage means a waste of memory resources.

TTE Systems has agreed to fund two further research projects in the Embedded Systems Laboratory (ESL) at the University of Leicester. The new projects will start in October 2007. Dr. Devaraj Ayavoo (Technical Manager, TTE Systems) commented: "TTE Systems is growing rapidly. To support future enhancements to our product line, it is important that we remain in touch with cutting-edge University research in the field of embedded systems. The ESL has an international reputation for its work in time-triggered systems and we have worked very successfully with staff from this lab in the past. We are now very pleased to be able to be able to begin two new research projects in conjunction with the ESL."




Design for ARM (System Software)

 

This section covers bootloaders, RTOS, and Linux distribution from open source community.

Bootloader

 

ARMboot is an Open-Source firmware suite for ARM based platforms. ARMboot is heavily based on the sister-project PPCboot, which provides similar functionality on PowerPC based systems. ARMboot shall be a common, easy-to-use and easy-to-port boot platform. Merged with PPCboot/U-boot.

 

The U-Boot Universal Bootloader project provides firmware with full source code under GPL. Many CPU architectures are supported: PowerPC(MPC5xx, MPC8xx, MPC82xx, MPC7xx, MPC74xx, 4xx), ARM(ARM7, ARM9, StrongARM, Xscale), MIPS(4Kc,5Kc), x86, … Very powerful.

 

Redboot, open source bootloader comes from Redhat/Cygnus, part of eCOS.

 

 

 

 

LART comes with its own boot loader, blob (Boot Loader OBject). Blob is copyrighted by Jan-Derk Bakker and Erik Mouw, and released with a slightly modified GNU GPL license. Major bootloader for ARM7TDMI core.

 

 

Compaq Bootldr is used for StrongARM, less supported now.

 

 

 

 

 

Complete OS

uClinux is developed for MOT/Freescale 68K, now very popular in ARM7 mmu-less cores

 

ARMLinux deliveries standard Embedded Linux full distribution over ARM9/ARM11 with MMU support

 

 

Windows Embedded for ARM distribution

 

 

 

 

Windows Mobile for Pocket PC and smart phone, ARM based.

 

 

 

 

Symbian is a software licensing company that develops and licenses Symbian OS, the global open industry standard operating system for advanced, data-enabled mobile phones.
Symbian licenses Symbian OS to the world's leading handset manufacturers. The following Symbian OS licensees have manufactured and announced Symbian OS-based mobile phones: Arima, BenQ, Fujitsu for NTT DoCoMo FOMA, Motorola, Nokia, Panasonic, Sendo, Siemens, Samsung and Sony Ericsson. In 2003, over 6.67 million Symbian OS-based mobile phones were sold worldwide and ten million have been sold overall to date.
Symbian is headquartered in London, UK with offices worldwide.

UIQ Technology AB is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications AB. UIQ Technology creates and licenses the open software platform, UIQ, to leading mobile phone manufacturers. The flexible and customizable user interface and development platform is pre-integrated and tested with Symbian OS, the leading industry standard operating system for mobile phones. www.uiq.com

 

Famous Palm OS moved from Motorola 's 68K to ARM platform already.

 

 

 

 

Established since 2001, Cwlinux offers Embedded Linux based solutions and development kits for ARM9 and ARM11 processor.

 

 

TRANGO Virtual Processors is a leading provider of embedded processor virtualization, licensing TRANGO Hypervisor IP to major semiconductors and devices manufacturers. The company helps customers to build up robust security architecture, deploy new value added services, and reduce their development costs as well as their bill-of-material.
Headquartered in Grenoble, France, TRANGO Virtual Processors has sales and support offices in US and Japan.

 

VirtualLogix™, Inc. is the global leader in Real-Time Virtualization™ technology for connected devices. VirtualLogix VLX enables multiple operating system environments to run concurrently on shared hardware and provides a range of performance, fault tolerance and security options to address specific market requirements. As a result, the world's largest semiconductor companies, manufacturers, OEMs and carriers are able to reduce development and bill of material costs, improve time to market by leveraging existing software investments, and create conditions that meet their business goals. With more than 20 years of experience developing system software for network infrastructure, digital multimedia and mobile handsets, VirtualLogix is paving the way for the development of next generation connected devices.

ACCESS has Linux distribution, and it used to have Palm source as well. Also ACCESS offers Java VM and NetFront Browser application software.

 

 

 

 

RTOS

 

uC/OS-II, an open sources (not free for commercial purpose) ported to ARM7 processors, with many 3rd party middleware.
Micrium provides high quality, royalty-free software (middleware) for the embedded systems market.

 

FreeRTOS comes from Richard Barry, which is a Free RTOS for embedded systems

 

 

 

 

eCOS, open source configurable RTOS from Red hat / Cygnu team, many middleware such as TCP/IP is included.

 

 

Since 1990, CMX Systems has focused on providing its customers with all of the tools needed to program their embedded applications. The company's core business is to develop and support real-time, multi-tasking operating systems (RTOS), TCP/IP stacks, flash file systems, USB stacks, and CANopen networking for a wide variety of 8-bit, 16-bit, and 32-bit microcomputers, microprocessors, and digital signal processors. In addition to developing RTOSes, debugging tools, and networking software, CMX also distributes a wide variety of C tools, including compilers, assemblers, linkers, librarians, simulators and ROM debuggers from many well-known manufacturers.

Enea Embedded Technology is a leading provider of real-time operating systems, development tools and services for fault-tolerant, high-availability and safety-critical applications. Enea Embedded Technology owns and markets the OSE real-time operating system. OSE is used in millions of products worldwide, including distributed communication systems such as communication infrastructure or mobile phones, avionics, medical, automotive and industrial control systems. Enea Embedded Technology is a subsidiary of Enea Data (SAXESS: ENEA), based in Stockholm, Sweden.

KADAK provides integrated RTOS, TCP/IP and GUI solutions for developers rushing to deliver products to market. KADAK software is packaged, documented and tailored for ease of use. Our AMX™ Real Time Operating System was the first commercial RTOS to be offered royalty free with a year of technical support. Our KwikNet® TCP/IP Stack and KwikPeg™ Graphical User Interface were the first to bring point-and-click setup to the embedded market, simplifying the porting of network and GUI services to your choice of OS and target processor. Since 1978, AMX has been in use worldwide by over 2500 embedded developers.

Keil, an ARM® Company, makes C compilers, macro assemblers, real-time kernels, debuggers, simulators, integrated environments, evaluation boards, and emulators for ARM7™ family, ARM9™ family and Cortex-M3™ processor-based microcontroller devices as well continuing to support classic XC16x/C16x/ST10, 251, and 8051 microcontroller families.

 

Wind River is the global leader in device software optimization (DSO). Wind River enables companies to develop and run software faster, better, at a lower cost and more reliably. Wind River Platforms tightly integrate a rich set of market-leading operating systems, development tools and middleware with services to provide a complete foundation that meets the specific requirements of a vertical market. Wind River's products and professional services are used in multiple markets including aerospace and defense, automotive, digital consumer, industrial, and network infrastructure. Companies from around the world turn to Wind River to create reliable products and to accelerate their time to market.

QNX Software Systems, a Harman International company (NYSE: HAR), is the industry leader in realtime, embedded OS technology. Our people, products, and services are focused on a singular goal: enabling our customer’s success through innovation.

 

 

Middleware

 

 

Aplix Corporation is the global leader in deploying Java™ technology in mobile phones and other consumer electronics devices. The company was founded in 1986 and has been a Sun Java™ licensee since 1996. Aplix has been publicly listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange (Mothers) since 2003.

Esmertec is a leading independent software company focusing on Java solutions and technologies for mass-market devices such as mobile phones, PDAs, home multimedia systems and machine-to-machine platforms. Our Java Virtual Machines and J2ME software solutions deliver high performance computing on small devices to mobile device and consumer appliance manufacturers and embedded systems solutions providers. Founded in 1999, Esmertec is a global company headquartered in Dübendorf-Zurich, with engineering, sales and customer support operations located in Switzerland, UK, France, USA, Singapore, China, Korea, Taiwan and Japan.

Express Logic, Inc., is the developer of the royalty-free ThreadX® real-time operating system (RTOS), the NetX™ TCP/IP networking stack, the FileX® MS/DOS compatible file system, and the USBX™ USB Host/Device protocol stack for embedded applications. With over 300 million units deployed, Express Logic’s royalty-free, full source code, professional support combination makes us the ideal choice for high-volume embedded products.

Grape Systems Inc. is a leading Solution Provider for embedded devices, and the major Japanese distributor for ThreadX, RTOS developed by Express Logic, Inc.

 

 

In this page you will find a pre-compiled binary distribution for the (hopefully) latest GNU ARM/Newlib toolchain. The toolchain consists of the GNU binutils, compiler set (GCC) and Insight debugger. Newlib is used for the C library. The toolchain includes the C and C++ compilers. Details of the build process appear here. The Windows installer executable files are generated with Inno Setup. If you have any problems using these files please use the mailing list for community-based support.

Imecs reconfigurable Program aims to build a general-purpose compute platform that allows to run different multimedia applications and that offers enough flexibility to download and execute future applications. This platform should therefore be powerful, flexible, energy conscious and inexpensive.

Everyone who is working with AVR microcontrollers knows this powerful tool – WinAVR which is completely open source and does the job comparable to commercial. It already has many routine tasks included in package that you don't need to worry about. So when shifting to ARM7 microcontrollers it is logical to try WinARM as nice alternative to WinAVR.

This site is the definitive resource for the community of developers and users of the Linux Kernel on the ARM Family of processors.