Rapid prototyping platforms for embedded developers
Discussions with companies often reveal that, driven by internal marketing and also by the apparently good availability of hardware and software solutions, highly popular community boards are used for the first prototypes, although these are often suited for true embedded solutions under very specific conditions only.
Time and again, the long-term availability of both the processor and the boards will not be guaranteed, the ECN (Engineering Change Notice) / PCN (Product Change Notification) procedure will be lacking, as will the qualification for extended temperature ranges documentation of the supply chain. Simultaneously, developers are also facing new challenges posed by increasingly complex products. These challenges comprise especially encryption technologies, driven by tightly interlinked devices, and the user interface design know-how required to meet the high user demands.
What is particularly annoying – and sometimes even critical – to a company, is the belated discovery that a selected solution will not meet the required product characteristics. When this happens after a working prototype has been developed at great expense, after schedules were announced and “industrialisation” planned, companies are often forced to return to the drawing board.
Several highly suitable platforms on the market can help companies avoid this scenario, but these are unfortunately not yet as familiar to developers as their counterparts in the maker environment. These platforms include SolidRun’s HummingBoard family (based on NXP i.MX 6 processors) and the TI processor based BeagleBoards family, to mention but a few.
A recent and particularly interesting solution is the Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 CPU based Dragonboard 410c, one of the first 64 bit ARMv8 processors, also suited for industrial applications. Thus far known in the consumer and mobile environment especially for its high-performance processors, Qualcomm is now addressing the industrial market specifically through three derivatives in its industrial Roadmap that promise longer availability than customary for mobile processors.
Along with the Snapdragon 410, the Roadmap also includes the two derivatives Snapdragon 600 and Snapdragon 820. Snapdragon 600, based on optimised Cortex-A15 cores known as Krait 300, is already available; boasting 4 Kryo cores and offering independent clocking as a special feature, Snapdragon 820 is expected at the end of the second quarter 2016.,. USB-3.1 and PCIe are also supported (chief characteristics are shown in table 1).
To optimally support the developers of embedded systems in their design-in, Arrow Electronics joined Linaro Ltd. in May last year. Linaro is a non-commercial organisation aiming to bring together industrial users and the open-source community, in order to cooperate on joint projects. A 96boards form factor was defined for this purpose, to create a standard for low cost Cortex-A development platform suitable to all manufacturers.
The first board was developed by Arrow in cooperation with Qualcomm and is based on Snapdragon 410. Additional boards that will be ideally suited for research and training are currently under development.
Snapdragon-410 is based on four Cortex-A53 cores, each clocked at up to 1.2 GHz, and the Qualcomm Adreno 306 graphics unit, capable of decoding and encoding full HD video (1080p) in H.264 (AVC) and supporting OpenGL ES 3.0, DirectX, OpenCL, Renderscript and FlexRender. Camera signals with resolutions up to 13 MP are processed by the integrated ISP (Image Signal Processor). The processor is produced using a 28 nm low-power process. The Snapdragon therefore offers an excellent balance between performance and power efficiency.
In addition to the actual processor, Qualcomm can also offer the relevant support chips such as the PM8916 Power Management Unit, including the audio codec, the WCN3620 RF front end for WiFi (IEEE 802.11 b/g/n) and Bluetooth 4.1 (Basic Rate + Enhanced Data Rate) as well as Bluetooth Low Energy. The WGR7640 GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) front end, supporting all currently available systems such as GPS, Galileo, GLONASS and Beidou, is included (figure 1).
The performance of the Cortex-A53 is significantly better (circa 1.5 times for the same clock frequency) than that of the Cortex-A7, which has been successfully introduced onto the market already, and must be seen as the technological successor.
Newly-introduced additional privilege levels will also offer developers a further innovation in the form of hardware support for virtualisation solutions such as KVM (see Figure 2). This will open up completely new approaches to partitioning of the application software. Time-critical processes may, for example, run in a RTOS instance and the user interface may run as an independent instance under Linux / Qt or Android – likely to render industrial applications of Android of greater interest.
The Dragonboard 410c is supported by Android 5.1, Linux (Ubuntu-based) and Windows 10 IoT Core. Little kernel is currently the boot loader; u-boot implementation is under development already. It features 1GB 533MHz LPDDR3 memory, 8GB eMMC 4.5, integrated WiFi, Bluetooth and GPS, all of these integrated on the 96boards CE form factor.
Apart from the CE form factor (CE – Consumer Edition) aimed at mobile, embedded and industrial applications, there is also an Enterprise Edition (EE) form factor designed for high-end embedded, networking and server applications.
The Dragonboard has two interface plugs: a 40 pin low-speed connector and a 60 pin high-speed expansion connector. The 40 pin low-speed connector (LS IO EXP) has connections for UART0 (UART1 optional), I²C, Power and Reset, SPI, PCM/I²S and up to 12 GPIO signals. The 60 pin high speed connector (HS IO EXP) will connect MIPI-DSI, MIPI-CSI2, I²C, HSIC (optional), SD-Card (incl. SPI), clocks and USB devices.
Complete design documentation is available for free, to use as a starting point for own applications, or simply as reference to study the Dragonboard 410c functionality. The webpage www.96boards.org will simultaneously serve as a platform for hardware extensions and communication between Linaro and the developers, including also the maker environment.
A big advantage of the Dragonboard, compared to other community boards, is that alternatives, equipped to handle any challenges arising in the industrial environment, are on offer for the Dragonboard. These comprise versions for extended temperature ranges as well as modules to solder in place, for instance to allow covering the entire PC board with a protective coating (conformal coating) to protect the electronics from harmful environmental impact. Deserving special mention:
- eInfochips Eragon-410
- Inforce 6309 Micro SBC / 6301 Micro SoM
- Intrynsic Open-Q™ 410
Since this processor generation originated in the mobile market, Android support is excellent. Linux support is also excellent via Linaro. Linux 4.2.4 and Debian 8.0 (jessie) are the current versions. An own kernel mailing list is accessible via linux-arm-msm at vger.kernel.org (archive and forums exist on the 96boards website.
In addition to Android and Linux, Dragonboard 410c also offers one of the first fully supported platforms for Windows 10 IoT Core. All the required files and a BSP may be downloaded from the Microsoft website free of charge. The graphics drivers in particular are fully hardware accelerated and will perform clearly better than other solutions – whilst offering also design security should the product need to be ported to a design suitable for industrial use. Microsoft can offer many programs as examples, allowing fast familiarisation with Universal Apps programming.
Qualcomm furthermore promotes applications in the field of robotics. Qualcomm is supporting the Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF) by porting important libraries to the Snapdragon processor family. Porting of BrainOS to the Dragonboard will be of interest here as well.
The 96boards member family is consistently being expanded – with an NXP i.MX 7 based PC board soon to be made available.
About the author:
Dieter Kiermaier is Specialized FAE High End / System-on-Modules at Arrow Electronics – www.arrow.com
If you enjoyed this article, you will like the following ones: don't miss them by subscribing to :
