Mid range embedded Processor

Question

I have worked on embedded projects with small 8 bit processor like the PIC and AVR and lots of high end Power PC work. I need a board for a project that is not going to work on a 8 bit processor but a Power PC with lots of memory and peripherals is total overkill.

The board does not need to run a OS and most of the peripherals will be in FPGAs so onboard peripherals is not so important however onboard Ethernet is a big plus.

Development tools is also a important consideration. Jtag emulator, a good debugger and BSP or driver code is a must. A development board to start development in parallel with hardware development will also help

I haven't look at something like this for a quite some time and hope some of you can give me some feedback on Boards/CPUs that you have recently used. I am very out of touch with what is available for a mid power solution.

On selected answer I ordered a LPC2000 development board for myself to check out since seems like a nice processor. The design however is going with a modified existing PPC design that is over kill but we have lots of experience on this platform. Maybe in future we can use a simpler design.

Answer 1

Have a look at the Gumstix boards - small form factor, embedded linux, lots of add-ons, free development tools and a big developer community - www.gumstix.net

The other thing I would look at is any ARM based boards.

Answer 2

I'd use something Arm based. Lots of choice, but Philips (NXP) LPC2000 series and Atmel SAM7 are very popular with lots of OEM/Devboard support.

Big range of tools for ARM from free GCC through commercial GCC (Rowley, very good), through to Keil/ARM (very good, very expensive).

There is a Yahoo LPC2000 group which is pretty good, if you can fight your way through the hobbyists...

Answer 3

I would suggest staying close to what you know. I have been happy with PICs and they have some options with 16 bit and even DSP engines, if required.

I have used boards from CCS, Modtronix, others and custom.

Answer 4

Look at an ARM based proc for sure. The previously mentioned Atmel SAM7 looks nice. It has onboard Ethernet and something like 8 A to D converters.

Answer 5

I find the Analog Devices BlackFin processor very nice. It can run Linux, the Analog Devices VisualDSP++ includes it's own RTOS Kernel, it has a pretty usable "Device Drivers and System Services" framework, and there are quite some nice Evaluation Boards (directly from Analog Devices) and Tinyboards (from BlueTechnix.com) available.

Answer 6

Microchip also has the PIC32. It's a MIPS 32-bit core. Same debugger can be used as with the 8-bitters.

Answer 7

Consider the 32 bit AVR processors. The MEGA line, and a few of their older chips. They provide a lot more flexibility and power than the 8 bit AVRs.