Atmel - Evaluation Kit Expedites Development on 400MHz ARM9-based Embedded MPU

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.

Linux Support
Atmel provides the Linux v2.6.27 operating system free of charge on its AT91SAM Linux portal at www.linux4sam.org. The Linux package includes the complete Linux v2.6.27 kernel, the Linux patch for the AT91SAM9G45 evaluation kit, device drivers, pre-built demonstrations and the Ångstrom distribution based on the OpenEmbedded building environment. The AT91SAM Linux portal is a gateway to a wide and growing community that provides Linux self-support for Atmel's entire ARM9(TM)-based range of embedded 32-bit microprocessors.

Windows CE Support
A full-featured Windows embedded BSP for the AT91SAM9G45 kit provides everything engineers need to deploy Microsoft's embedded technologies on Atmel's ARM9-based products. It can be downloaded from the website http://www.at91.com/Windows4SAM. Extensive documentation is available that includes a ready-to-run demonstration explaining how to use and customize the BSP source code and how to build applications based on the Windows BSPs.

Extensive World-wide Third Party Ecosystem
Leading third-party providers of embedded software offer a wide range of middleware, development tools and RTOS that support the SAM9G45 as part of Atmel's worldwide ecosystem for AT91SAM microcontrollers as follows:

Mentor Graphics
Our long-term, solid working relationship with Atmel enables customers to use our Nucleus RTOS and Nucleus Graphics user interface for optimum performance, said Glenn Perry, Mentor Graphics'® embedded systems division general manager. By using the SAM9G45 board, and Mentor Graphics development tools and software IP, embedded developers can now create advanced 2D and 3D graphical user interfaces on their devices in record time, without the need for hardware acceleration.