Cortex-A5 evaluation kit speeds microprocessor-based designs

24th February 2014

Mick Elliott

0 0

Farnell element14 and Atmel today (February 25) announced the launch of Atmel’s new SAMA5D3 Xplained evaluation kit, a low-cost, fast prototyping and evaluation platform for microprocessor-based design. The board, which is based on Atmel’s SAMA5D3 ARM Cortex-A5 processor-based MPU, comes with a rich set of ready-to-use connectivity and storage peripherals, along with Arduino shield-compatible expansion headers for easy customisation.

A Linux distribution and software package also enables rapid software development. The board is a perfect target for headless Android too.

“Atmel's ARM Cortex-A5 processor-based MPUs deliver balance in a rich set of devices and ultra low power consumption that meet your every industrial design need,” said David Shen, Chief Technology Officer at Premier Farnell. “This new Atmel Xplained kit, in addition to our soon-to-be-available expansion boards which will add more capabilities to the SAMA5D3 platform, will be very helpful to professional engineers as well as makers, hobbyists, educators and students, both within and outside their main employment.”

The SAMA5D3 series is ideal for wearable computing and mobile applications where low power and a small footprint are critical.

The SAMA5D3 Xplained features include Atmel’s Xplained hardware platform for evaluation and rapid prototyping; a fully documented and readily available Cortex-A5 based MPU solution; a rich set of peripherals, specifically on connectivity; USB power (no need for power adaptor); Arduino-compatible connectors, enabling the user to leverage the extensive Arduino shields ecosystem; Open Source hardware – All design files available; easy to reuse in customer projects; a software package with drivers and examples for bare metal developers; and Qt developers kit and Linux distribution free of charge.

The SAMA5D3 Xplained will ship in mid-March 2014 from Farnell element14 in Europe, Newark element14 in North America and element14 in APAC. Pre-registration for the product can be done at www.element14.com/sama5d3.