Toshiba Electronics Starter Kit Simplifies Prototyping of Embedded Systems for HMI Applications

The BMSKTOPAS900 Starter Kit provides all of the hardware and software needed to speed the development of embedded applications where HMI features and high levels of connectivity are required. Such applications include industrial control systems, consumer multimedia products and new and emerging home appliances. In the case of the latter Toshiba’s TMPA90xCMXBG devices simplify compliance with the IEC60730 (Class B) safety standard through an integrated Oscillation Frequency Detector (OFD) that facilitates hardware monitoring of the CPU clock.

Based on the low-power 32-bit ARM926EJ-S™ core operating at up to 200MHz, TMPA90xCMXBG microcontrollers feature integrated graphics capabilities including an LCD controller and an image process accelerator that provides on-chip scaling, filtering and image blending at resolutions up to 800 x 480. Built-in functionality includes a 10-bit ADC, timers, a melody/alarm generator and USB Host/Device, SPI, SD-Card, UART, I2C and I2S connectivity. A touch screen controller and CMOS image sensor provide further flexibility when implementing HMI designs.

Toshiba’s new starter kit is based around an evaluation board that combines the host microcontroller with a 3.5” touch screen display, memory, SD-card sockets, a joystick control and input and output audio jacks with associated audio DAC. Extensive connectivity is offered in the form of Ethernet, USB and RS232 interfaces as well as a JTAG interface to ease debugging. The on-board memory comprises 64MByte SDRAM, 32MByte of NOR Flash and 256 MByte of NAND Flash.

The BMSKTOPAS900 is supplied with a J-Link ARM USB-driven JTAG emulator offering download speeds of up to 720kbytes/s and a maximum JTAG speed of 12MHz. Further development support is available through third party tools such as Segger emWin graphical user interface software and embOS real time operating system, and development software from Atollic, IAR and Keil. For Linux-based designs a free-of-charge development environment is available from bplan.