TS-7550

The TS-7550 features a 250MHz Cavium ARM9 CPU and a 5000 LUT Lattice FPGA. With 64MB RAM and a bootable 256MB on-board flash with our new XNAND technology, the TS-7550 is a powerful and extremely reliable embedded solution. External devices can connect to the TS-7550 via Ethernet, USB host, USB device, or I2C ports as well as DIO, UARTs, and SPI which are implemented in the standard FPGA load. The 44 pin downward-facing general-purpose header makes it easy to interface the TS-7550 with a baseboard of your own design. Using just under 400mA at 5V, a TS-7550 driven product can be fully powered by a USB device cable.

Does your application require custom real-time logic such as non-standard bus interfaces, PWM outputs, quadrature decoding, pulse timing, or digital counters? Technologic Systems can integrate that functionality into a custom TS-7550 FPGA configuration for an elegant and affordable solution.

The TS-7550 development kit includes the TS-ENC750 enclosure with the TS-752 baseboard. The TS-752 baseboard demonstrates the power of the TS-7550, implementing Relays, RS-232, RS-485, Power over Ethernet, and signal protection for DIO.

The standard TS-7550 FPGA configuration implements the following features:

• up to 8 UARTs (XUARTs*)
• SPI
• Watchdog timer
• up to 33 DIO lines

Differences between TS-7500 and TS-7550

The TS-7500 and TS-7550 are very similar products. The TS-7500 has a microSD card whereas the TS-7550 does not. The TS-7550 instead includes 256MB of NAND flash with our XNAND technology for ultra-reliability.

XNAND Technology

Technologic Systems XNAND technology is a user-space device driver that uses Reed-Solomon codes, extra checksums, and a RAID based technique to allow any Linux filesystem to be used with confidence on SLC or MLC NAND flash. Our TS-BOOTROM can also boot from XNAND for an ultra-reliable bootup. Please refer to the XNAND whitepaper for more information.

* Technologic Systems XUART core is an extended UART core supporting 7, 8, 9, or 10 bits per character, Tx and Rx FIFOs 256+ characters deep, and accurate measurement of idle and busy times. These ports support advanced protocols such as DMX/RDM. There is also one serial port in the CPU for a total of 9 serial ports.

The TS-7550 SBC boots to Linux 2.6 from on-board flash using the proprietary TS-BOOTROM bootup firmware residing in ROM memory. 4MB of the on-board flash is used to store a bootable kernel image and an initial ramdisk image. A bootable NAND flash must contain a Linux kernel image, an initial ramdisk image, and a valid Linux root filesystem. The fast Linux bootup solution was optimized for speed and includes kernel, initrd, and filesystem (Busybox) tweaks. Since this board boots to an initrd (initial ram disk) with a read-only mounted filesystem, it is possible to have something other than a shell prompt running after bootup by editing the /linuxrc shell script on the initrd. Additional TS-7550 software features include:

• Boots Linux 2.6 out-of-the-box in less than 3 seconds (to a shell prompt).
• Un-brickable design ensures 100% recoverability from external flash of TS-752 in case of on-board flash erasure.
• Startup Linux mini-root scripts allow flexible root and backup filesystem selection (NFS, USB flash) as well as software field upgrade support.

Linux OS Support

Technologic Systems' TS-7550 ARM Single Board Computers (SBC) are compatible with a wide range of Operating Systems (OS's). The Linux choice is highly recommended and our products are totally integrated with the open-source vision. The boards ship with Linux 2.6 kernel running out-of-the-box. There is no proprietary source code in the kernel since all the hardware specific functionalities are handled by user-space utilities. The Linux kernel includes driver support for on-board hardware, enabling quick time to market for end-users' applications. Examples and source codes are also available for downloading.

The compact initial ramdisk filesystem is based on Busybox and uClibc and is improved for performance and flexibility. Specific Linux scripts and utilities that handle the TS-7550 functions are included.

CAN Bus Support in User Space

The TS-7550 utilizes an SJA1000C-compatible FPGA core out of the box complete with documentation and sample code. The sample code provides a simple utility to send/receive CAN packets and perform useful and common functions with the CAN bus from userspace. Additionally, this sample code includes network CAN service and can be automatically started on TS-7550 bootup which makes the writing of CAN enabled applications even simpler and furthermore allows for the possibility of development in languages other than C (Java, Python, etc..) and on systems other than the local Linux SBC (Linux/x86, Windows, etc..)

Please contact Technologic Systems for further information regarding Operating System and software support for this product.