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TASS successfully experiments with ARM Cortex A8

Background

For internal projects, TASS has acquired an evaluation board based on the brand-new ARM Cortex A8 System On Chip. The key hardware specifications of the Embest Devkit8000 evaluation board are:

 

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TI OMAP3530 Processor based on 600MHz ARM Cortex-A8 core

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Memory supporting 128MByte DDR SDRAM and 128MByte NAND Flash

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UART, USB OTG, Ethernet, Camera, Audio, SD/MMC, Keyboard, Jtag,...

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Support for 24-bit TFT LCD/VGA, DVI-D and TV S-Video Output Display

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Work done at TASS

At TASS the first steps have been taken to make this platform a versatile powerhouse for internal projects. The device and the development environment are perfect tools for rapid prototyping and fast development as well as in-depth programming of kernel device drivers.

 

3 major embedded OS's have been tested on the platform:

 

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Win CE including the .NET framework came pre-installed on the Devkit.

 

 

 

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A custom embedded Linux based upon OpenEmbedded was built and tested, the hardware graphics acceleration drivers based upon the PowerVR chip have been integrated and some OpenGL demo's were built to demonstrate these powerful graphics. The OpenGL demo's were visible at the TASS booth on the “Bits & Chips Hightech Systemen” event in Leuven in November 2009.

 

 

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Android version 1.6 codename “Cupcake” was built as a proof of concept. A demo application written at TASS, previously only tested on the Android emulator, was installed on the platform and proven to work on a real world device.

 

In the future different embedded software engineers at TASS will continue to develop software for this ARM based platform. This way the embedded software engineering skills of our developers are continuously improved and real challenges are provided so that the customer gets more skilled developers who have knowledge of the latest embedded hardware.