October 16, 2001 – San Jose, CA – Altera Corp. launched its Excalibur System Development Kit to give embedded designers all the necessary software and hardware support they need to develop system-on-a-programmable-chip (SOPC) designs with the widely adopted ARM9T 32-bit processor core.
Available immediately, the Excalibur System Development Kit includes a development board with the 200 MHz EPXA10 ARM-based Excalibur device that supports complex SOPC designs of up to 38,400 logic elements (1 million system gates). The development board includes flash memory, SDRAM DIMM sockets and memory card, 10/100 Ethernet PHY, industry standard PCI bus connectors, expansion headers for add-on daughter cards, support for the ARM Embedded Trace Macrocell interface and JTAG debug interface, as well as necessary connecting cables, and power supplies. The development board supports WindRiver Systems Inc.’s VxWorks AE real-time operating system (RTOS).
Subscribers to Altera’s latest Quartus II development environment will have access to Excalibur ARM-based bus functional models, simulation models for the embedded processor stripe, and access to the ARM-Lite Development Suite (ADS) of compilers, linkers, debuggers, and assemblers.
Anna Chiang, director of marketing for Altera’s Excalibur Business Unit, said future versions of the Excalibur Development Kit will also include other industry-standard embedded software support, such as RedHat GNUPro Tools as well as Linux support.
“We will be including Board Support Packages (BSPs) for VxWorks AE and other operating systems including reference device driver support for commonly used peripherals to relieve embedded designers of the burden of developing their own drivers,” Chiang said. “This will help shorten their development time and accelerate their time-to-market.”
The Excalibur Development Kit also includes complete product documentation, hardware and software reference designs, a set of utilities for creation and download of programming files, and application notes. In addition, a UART soft IP core and an evaluation version of a 10/100 Ethernet MAC with low-level software drivers for the MAC are included.
The Excalibur development kit, featuring EPXA10 ARM-based embedded processor solution is available now for $10,000.