Board Bring-up

PetaLogix are the experts in Linux board bringup on FPGA platforms - now our expertise is available to get your Embedded Linux platform up and running in record time.

Delivered as a customised PetaLinux development environment, your team will be productive from day 1 with a ready-made Embedded Linux platform solution tailored to your hardware.

While we've booted Linux on more boards than we can remember, some of the memorable ones include

• a customer board with a Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGA, dual gigabit ethernet ports, and both PCI and custom interconnect to an image processing chip
• an ARM Cortex-M0 FPGA system based on a custom RealView evaluation board image, integrating devices drivers for a wide range of standard ARM IP modules

We've also booted Linux on just about every Xilinx evaluation board in recent years.

Moving ahead

Once Linux is up and running on your hardware, it's time to customise the hardware and software architecture for your product.  This is where PetaLogix Kernel and Driver Customisation, and Custom IP Design and Integration services come into play.

Recommended Minimum Requirements

Customers often ask us about minimum requirements for running Linux.  There are no fixed rules, and it will ultimately depend on the tasks your system will  perform.  However, there are a few general rules of thumb:

Memory

• SDRAM / DDR / DDR2 - 4 MB minimum, 16MB or more recommended
• Flash / NVRAM - 8MB minimum

Ethernet

• The Linux kernel's network stack is one of its great strengths, and networking capabilites can really help during product development.
• The Xilinx ethernetlite and tri-mode (LL_TEMAC) ethernet devices are fully supported, along with standard network drivers in the Linux kernel.
  

Serial Ports

• At least one serial port is recommended, even if just for test and development.
• All Xilinx serial port IP cores (uartlite, 16550) are supported, as well as standard serial devices supported by the Linux kernel.