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Looking for controller, operating system, and network stack for an embedded system

I'm working on a project at work that requires a new controller, operating system, a network stack, and a myriad of services (ssh, telnet, web, etc...). My desires are as follows:

  • 200-600Mhz operation (e.g. PowerPC 440EP and ARM XScale)
  • Instruction cache desirable
  • As many GPIOs as possible
  • At least 1 I2C bus
  • Ethernet
  • At least 16Mb of externally addressable address space
  • SDRAM Controller
  • LCD Controller
  • USB Client and host (1.1 is OK)

I've already taken a close look at the PowerPC 440EP and the Intel XScale series of CPUs, but I want to make sure I'm not missing anything obvious or relevant.

Regarding the software stack, I need (in pieces or as a complete package):

  • An operating system (have looked at ThreadX, MontaVista Linux, uCOS-II, eCOS, QNX, LynxOS)
  • A network stack, BSD API
  • Telnet server, DHCP client, DNS client, SSH server, HTTP (including PHP), FTP server, TFTP server,
  • Simple windowing API for the LCD screen (TinyX or a custom library is OK)
  • Drivers for the aforementioned hardware components
  • Flash file system
  • Remote firmware update capabilities using flash parts
  • IPMI 1.5 or higher stack desirable - a bonus

Commercial, fee - does not matter provided that it meets our requirements. If you're a commercial company and have a product relevant to the above, please email me with details.

Thanks!

-->Neil

Reply to
Neil Bradley
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If you can live with an Intel/PC104/Industrial PC solution take a look at:

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I can highly recommend it (I have no connection with them). Client side USB will be the problem with this solution but I get around this using an I2C USB chip.

Regards, Richard.

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Reply to
Richard

...

Do you want an embedded computer, or an embedded system, if you get my meaning?

In our experience (we got bitten by the Intel SA-1110 withdrawal), CPU chips with integral LCD controllers are mostly designed for PDAs and tend to have short lifetimes for industrial products. The combination of on-chip Ethernet and LCD is also rare. For industrial use, the combination of CPU+Ethernet with an external LCD controller seems to give a hardware solution with lower product lifetime costs.

Assuming that your response times are modest, you can always use an on-board bus to link the central controller to slaves for GPIO. Single chip 60MHz ARMs are cheap these days. Such an architecture also allows you to decouple the fast/hard real-time I/O from the nightmares of predicting worst case interrupt latency and jitter on a SDRAM/cached/MMUed/multitasking *computer*.

Perhaps I'm just feeling grumpy this morning. More caffeine needed!

Stephen

-- Stephen Pelc, snipped-for-privacy@INVALID.mpeltd.demon.co.uk MicroProcessor Engineering Ltd - More Real, Less Time

133 Hill Lane, Southampton SO15 5AF, England tel: +44 (0)23 8063 1441, fax: +44 (0)23 8033 9691 web:
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Reply to
Stephen Pelc

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