Freescale Semiconductor has introduced a low-cost evaluation module for the MSC815x and MSC825x family of programmable digital signal processors (DSPs) intended for medical, aerospace, defense and test/measurement applications.
The MSC8156 Evaluation Module (MSC8156EVM) is a PCI Express short card form factor development solution that allows for the deployment of Freescale’s highest performing DSPs alongside the company’s QorIQ P4080 and P2020 multicore communications processors in a Single Board Computer format.
MSC8156EVM comes with Freescale’s SmartDSP OS (SDOS), the royalty-free DSP operating system, with integrated DSP drivers for many peripherals such as PCI Express, Ethernet and Serial RapidIO as well as DDR memory interfaces. It also includes a three month evaluation license for Freescale’s full-featured, Eclipse-based CodeWarrior Integrated Development Environment (IDE).
Tools included in the offering are an efficient SC3850 C compiler, assembly optimizer, debugger and extensive profiling and software analysis tools. The EVM also includes intrinsics, application notes and 40+ DSP libraries that help accelerate a customer’s design to market – whether porting from previous StarCore families or competitors’ DSP architectures.
Customers can purchase the evaluation kit for the price of $495 USD. Customers wishing to migrate to the more comprehensive MSC8156 Application Development System (MSC8156ADS) who have purchased the MSC8156EVM will receive a discount off the purchase of the MSC8156ADS platform. The discount represents the $495 cost of purchasing the MSC8156EVM.
Features
- PCI express short form factor
- Supports the MSC815x and MSC825x DSPs at 1 GHz
- A single 1GB DDR3 204-pin SODIMM, 64-bit @ 800 MHz (no ECC)
- Dual Gigabit Ethernet on RJ45 connectors
- X4 PCIe/SRIO/SGMII on PCI edge connector
- Integrated Debug interface (USB TAP controller, eUTAP)
- Stand-alone mode with external 12V DC or PCI Express mode powered from PCI-E edge connector
About the MSC8156 Digital Signal Processor
The MSC8156 DSP delivers flexibility, integration and affordability while answering the demand from many of today’s DSP applications requiring ultra-high computational performance. The MSC815x and MSC825x DSPs are an ideal choice for many DSP applications including medical, aerospace, defense and test/measurement, multi-standard wireless base stations, video conferencing servers and voice gateways. These families of DSPs offer up to a total of 48 GMACs (Giga Multiply and Accumulate) per second of DSP core performance and the MSC815x family features a MAPLE coprocessor with DFT/ FFT, Turbo and Virterbi acceleration.
Availability
The MSC8156EVM has a suggested resale price of $495 (USD) and is available now.
