 |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |
 Posted: 11/16/98 Board, software offered for Lexra's RISC coresEmbedded Performance Inc. (EPI; Milpitas, Calif.) has announced the first two in a series of products to support the Lexra LX-4080 family of RISC microprocessor cores. The LXB4080 Evaluation Board, a full-length pc board in the PCI form factor, supports development of ASICs, software and hardware designs based on the Lexra LX-4080 RISC core. The CCE3K Software Toolkit is a development package that complements the features of the LXB4080 board and allows debugging of optimized code. EPI and Lexra Inc. (Waltham, Mass.) said the LXB4080 evaluation board is suited for software code development, debug and verification before the availability of the ASIC or target hardware. It also allows prototyping of coprocessors, custom engines and Lexra Bus components that will eventually be integrated into ASICs. The board is populated with a Lexra LX-4080 test chip, some PLDs, a Galileo 64060 interface controller, a boot PROM, two PLLs, a dual UART, a set of bus transceivers and a DRAM SIMM socket. Connectors are available for the two serial ports, for access to the Lexra Bus, and for access to the Lexra core's custom engine and coprocessor interfaces. The tool kit, meanwhile, supports the Lexra test chip and processors based on the MIPS R3000 architecture. It consists of an optimizing C cross-compiler, macro assembler, high-speed linker/locator, target resident debug kernel, symbolic debugger and a full C source-level debugger. The tool kit, which runs on Windows, is available for PC, Sun and Hewlett-Packard host computers and workstations. The companies also announced they will codevelop an enhanced JTAG-based emulation port for an upcoming Lexra RISC core. The emulator will provide access to the internal registers and state of the CPU, making it easier to debug ASICs that include deeply embedded Lexra cores. The LXB4080 Evaluation Board is $4,500; the CCE3K Software Toolkit is $3,500. Xilinx Inc. and its AllianceCore partner Memec Design Services (Mesa, Ariz.) have announced the release of seven cores that directly plug into the Xilinx Core Generator tool. Previously, cores from AllianceCore partners had to be separately incorporated into designs. The new cores from Memec are accessible from within the Core Generator environment. They include the XF-TWSI I2C-compatible two-wire serial interface, XF8250 UART, XF8255 programmable peripheral interface, XF8256 multifunction microprocessor support controller, XF8279 programmable keyboard display interface, XF9128 video terminal logic controller and XFRSDVB Reed-Solomon encoder for DVB (digital video broadcast). All of these cores are available for $99 and are contained in the Memec Encore CD, available through Insight Electronics in North America (and elsewhere through the Memec International Components Group). Memec has also packaged linear-feedback shift register and state-machine reference libraries for Xilinx FPGAs on the CD. 
|
| ||||||||||||||||
