TS-7300

The TS-7300 is a multipurpose board designed specifically for customers needing extreme design security, flexibility, and reliability in applications such as gaming machines, building security equipment, or critical network infrastructure services such as network gateways or firewalls. A 8256 LUT Cyclone II FPGA is included on the board. The Embedded FPGA Linux system is reconfigurable on-the-fly by the Cirrus EP9302 with an Arm9™ core running Debian Linux when an additional real-time soft-coprocessor(s), DSP, or specific additional peripheral logic is needed.

Unique security features on the TS-7300 include the ability for the board hardware to first checksum the boot SD flash card in its entirety before executing a single instruction of code from it. One may also use the security features of a SD card to hardware lock and password protect the boot flash card so that the card is only bootable and readable on a single TS-7300 device. Any SD flash card can also be made read-only permanently and irreversibly once your product is finalized for additional design security.

The board also includes many features for high reliability computing and control. SD flash technology is already extremely reliable compared to hard drives, but with 2 hot-swappable flash card sockets running full-blown operating systems such as Linux, you have the option to use RAID on your flash devices to protect against potential individual flash write wearout failures. Also, every component on the board is rated for +70 or +80 degrees Celsius ambient temperatures without heat sinks or fans. Unlike typical embedded PC or laptop motherboards, which can barely sustain thermal balance at room temperature with large heatsinks, the TS-7300 operates with relatively huge margins in similar conditions, thereby increasing hardware lifetime and reliability.

The inclusion of an Altera FPGA and a dedicated high-speed bus between the CPU and FPGA provides unique design possibilities in the hands of creative embedded designers. The Linux FPGA has its own dedicated 8MB SDRAM and customers can load their own bitstream or use the default TS-built bitstream that provides the hardware logic for the 8 serial ports, second 10/100 ethernet port, second SD card slot, 640x480 VGA video and up to 35 DIO lines connected straight to the FPGA. These DIO lines can also be used as an FPGA connected expansion bus instead of the CPU connected regular PC/104 expansion bus.

embeddedTS's TS-7300 Arm based Single Board Computers (SBC) are compatible with a wide range of Operating Systems (OS's). The Linux choice is highly recommended and our products are totally integrated with the open-source vision. The Linux OS, TS-Kernel 2.4.26, is shipped by default with our Arm based SBCs and includes complete driver support for our hardware within the kernel, enabling quick time to market for end-users' applications. Examples and source codes are also available for downloading.

The embeddedTS Arm-based SBCs are configured by default to load the Debian Linux OS from the SD card on the first socket during boot up time. The full featured Debian Linux distribution includes a complete GNU C/C++ embedded development environment installed. In addition, Apache Web Server, FTP, SSH, Telnet and Samba internet services are available with C/PHP/Perl for embedded CGI development.

The Linux solution for Arm cores is compatible with the RTAI real-time extension, enabling systems with strict timing requirements to be handled with our SBCs. Furthermore, NetBSD has been ported to embeddedTS Arm based SBCs and Java solutions are also available.