Opinions about the NXP LPC3000

"Michael" skrev i meddelandet news: snipped-for-privacy@r30g2000prh.googlegroups.com...

What do you want to do with the FPU?

You can get the SAM9263 with CAN nowadays.

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Best Regards,
Ulf Samuelsson
This is intended to be my personal opinion which may,
or may not be shared by my employer Atmel Nordic AB

What's you application?

OR

What are your interests and needs?

The LPC3180 has the ARM "standard" VFP which should be supported by recent versions of GCC. If you're planning to use Linux you should go for a EABI kernel and userland, to allow mixing of softfloat and VFP objects in a single program. I only ran a quick test for the crunch support in GCC 4.1.2 on a Cirrus EP-9301 (which isn't supposed to have the crunch coprocessor) but everything worked fine. Of course there's still the posibility of some unhandled problems.

The documentation on the LPC3180 certainly lacks behind. I had to contact NXP support on several ocassions, and response time so far varied from 1

1/2 hours to weeks with no reply. Of course I have no commercial interest in their device, as I'm only using the LPC3180 as a test platform for my open source debugger, so ymmv.

The ARM7 processors from NXP are widely used, I guess the company can't be that bad. I don't find the NXP website that bad - I especially like that

gets you directly to the product you're interested in.

I'm using the Phytec phyCORE-LPC3180 board that comes with a "Linux BSP" that isn't worth the 13692263 bytes the zip archive occupies. Ancient versions of U-Boot and Linux, a filesystem with kernel modules for peripherals that shouldn't exist on the LPC3180, code that certainly wont get anywhere near upstream and a first-stage bootloader that can only be compiled using ADS make it hardly useable.

Regards,

Dominic

Re-Reading this, I think I should clarify some things: The board itself is great - a small CPU module with all the high-speed BGA parts on it, and a breakout board with connectors for serial, USB etc.

The port also wasn't done by Phytec AIUI, but by/for NXP - a similar port should be available for the Nohau board. The application note describing the port is from Philips/NXP.

The point is that if you want to use Linux on the LPC3180 you'll probably have to rewrite larger parts of u-boot and the kernel.

Regards,

Dominic

Please do not top-post. Your answer belongs after (or intermixed with) the quoted material to which you reply, after snipping all irrelevant material. See the following links:

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meddelandetnews: snipped-for-privacy@r30g2000prh.googlegroups.com...

Hi Ulf - the reason I want an FPU is that I'm tons and tons of floating point math. I'm currently using an AT91SAM7X256, but as I increase complexity I suspect I'm going to run out of CPU cycles. It's mostly just algebraic functions and trig right now.

I'm also somewhat worried about using Atmel ARM parts - I've heard that there's been alot of turmoil in the ARM division, more so than in other divisions and that it isn't particularly stable right now.

Thanks,

-Michael

Hi Joe - the application is for a controller onboard a 6 legged walking robot. It is doing a large amount of math in real time, mostly algebraic stuff along with a large amount of trig. Lots of large floating point matrices being multiplied together. I don't have a specific FLOPS need or anything along those lines - but the need is constantly growing and I don't like to be caught with my pants down. (happened in a water theme park in Florida when I was a little kid - never again!)

-Michael

OK, first of all have haven't tried it for myself... but I have contact who are currently designing with it.

Now we have an idea of your requirement.

-Certainly the LPC3180 is quite fast >200MHz

-Low power to meet battery comsumption requirements.

- Does need a few voltage reguators.

-Does need external ram and flash memory

-Has 7 UARTS (serial port).

-Vector Floating point co-processor

The LPC3000 (LPC3180) is a Micro processor and requires external RAM, Flash and better I/O drivers.

You might be better of with one of the LPC2000 series micro controllers with everything on board (flash RAM, I/O ADC, DAC etc)

50Mips is quite handy (no Foating point hardware)

You may want to down load the limited edition of one of the complier suppliers - Keil, IAR, GCC Open Source and others.

Do complie same maths C code and check the code compulational instruction requirements before making a decision.

Also Integer maths and other numerical techniques can be use to over come some of the floating point maths requirements.

Joe

I don't know from whence you got this port, but the port supplied by Phytec (created by Viosoft) at least contains U-Boot 1.1.1 and Linux

2.6.10. If not, you should be able to receive a recent version from Phytec.

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Hi Joe - I'm already using an AT91SAM7X256 with IAR. For now it's working well, but I think in the future that I'm going to run out of CPU cycles with it. This would be for an upgraded board. I also want to move up to running Linux, or possibly an RTOS.

-Michael

That's what I've got here, and I'm quite unhappy with it. Guess I sounded a bit too harsh, but that port really doesn't help a lot.

Linux 2.6.10 was released in December 2004, U-Boot 1.1.1 was released April

2004, and apparently nothing was brought upstream. More than two years are an eternity given the speed at which Linux (and U-Boot, too) evolves, and relying on a vendor port that isn't in mainline is guaranteed to get you into trouble at some point. See for some nice points. One reason for this mess might be that the LPC3180 looks like a stripped-down Nexperia, which is geared at OEMs only AIUI.

The LPC3180 and its VFP would make a nice platform for playing with EABI's support for mixed softfloat and hardfloat objects, but using EABI requires kernel 2.6.16+.

Of course the port also got its strong points, like this excerpt from a header file: #if !defined DO_NOT_TAINT_KERNEL_SOURCE_WITH_DUMB_DUM_STUFF /* Not really wanted here as DUM is meant to be a secret ! */ The root filesystem of course contains a kernel module called "sdum.ko"...

Other nice stuff from the port includes the address of a "DSP slave" reading from which causes the LPC3180 to completely lock up :)

Best regards,

Dominic

If you want an FPU ARM, Atmel and NXP are not the places you should be looking as there choices are few and far inbetween. The Freescale MC55xx and infineon triCore (e.g., TC1166) have FPU's as well as FLASH,SRAM, CAN, 12 bit A/D's all in one. They are used in the auto market.

SAM9263 runs at 200-240 MHz. Should give you a lot more performance AND a CAN bus. SAM9260A will run at 350-400 MHz.

Atmel has never had an "ARM" division. There has been an ASIC division which sold ASIC, ASSPs and AT91. The AT91 is moved to the microcontroller division which means that instead of sharing resources with the ASIC guys, they are sharing reasons with the AVR guys.

Have you considered the AT572D740? ARM7 + 1 Gflops?

--
Best Regards,
Ulf Samuelsson
This is intended to be my personal opinion which may,
or may not be shared by my employer Atmel Nordic AB

I concur. Of the 3 support tickets I opened with NXP, 2 were completely ignored and one took over a week to receive a reply. Once you get the first level support guy to talk to you (assuming you are that lucky), it's hard to get the attention of the next level people who can really help you. I get the feeling that they simply don't have enough support people to meet the demand for assistance.

The best place to get help with NXP parts is the Yahoo lpc2000 forum. Although I mostly hate the NXP management, their chips have been easier to work with that the other Arm devices I tried. It's a shame that they can't get their act together.

My experience with Atmel is entirely different. Although I'm clearly not a high volume customer, I have always gotten replies. Not always quick, but I give them a lot of credit for 100% of my issues being resolved in a reasonable timeframe. Their chips are harder to use, but that's because they're more advanced with much stronger peripherals.

You might also look at the AVR32 if you have high end needs.

Eric

I will take a closer look at those parts - they might work for me.

Hmm - I heard that the ARM line was starting to get ignored, and that the fab that makes the ARMs might soon be getting sold.

I have - but what sort of compiler support is there for it? I can't find any information about this.

On a side note - what can you tell me about the XMega AVRs? I'm specifically interested in when they'll be sampling, and when production quantities will be available. I have a board that is currently using an ATMEGA168 - and not only am I running out of flash (fixable by moving up to a larger AVR), but I also really, really need DMA on it. So these boards are going to be redesigned soon, and ideally I'd like to use XMegas on them.

Thanks,

-Michael

I was mislead by the screenshot in the documentation; it said: "U-Boot 1.1.1 (Oct 10 2006 - 09:11:57" but I know now that would make it something inbetween 1.1.4 and 1.1.5.

Nice points indeed: "So, vendors tend to be working on old releases, even though they want current features. Thus it's not surprising that he found a vendor release that was based on 2.6.10 but was actually closer to a later release, based on patch size."

Nice.

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Yes the recent license of an ARM1176 is a clear indication in that direction ;-)

Atmel has announced plans to sell off North Tyneside and Heilbronn and neither of them makes ARM, looks more like FUD from competition.

There is an extensive handoptimized library for the Magic DSP,

is the right website. Talk to your local Atmel contact about additional info on toolset. Everything is not available on the official website.

Is there such a thing as an X-Mega :-)

--
Best Regards,
Ulf Samuelsson
This is intended to be my personal opinion which may,
or may not be shared by my employer Atmel Nordic AB

Hi Ulf,

What happened to the AT91SAM9XE512 ?

Did the press releases somewhat pre-empt the working silicon ?

-jg

It is in development, but schedules should be discussed off line.

--
Best Regards,
Ulf Samuelsson
This is intended to be my personal opinion which may,
or may not be shared by my employer Atmel Nordic AB