[LinuxBIOS] LPC SuperIO "add-in card"

Indrek Kruusa indrek.kruusa at artecdesign.ee
Fri Dec 1 12:26:31 CET 2006


Tom Sylla wrote:
> Another idea, there has been a lot of talk about homebrew LPC ROM
> emulators. It would not be much more work to make the emulator into a
> generic LPC analyzer. You could have it catch regular serial, or you
> could just have print_debug spew bytes to a specified I/O location.
> With careful design, high speed USB can keep up with the ~16MB/s you
> could spew to LPC. This would not end up costing much more than the
> SIO solution, the biggest cost is still the PCB/connectors (male
> PLCC).
>
>
>   

For current Thincan (artecgroup/dbe61) development we are using our own 
designed dongles:

- LPC connector (the cable shouldn't be longer than 5cm/2 inch)
- Altera Cyclone FPGA as the control part
- 16 MB flash: 4x separate 4MB banks; chosen by jumpers (I can have 4 
separate booting configs( LB/kernel/initrd) in one dongle)
- chosen flash bank is seen as 1MB at boot, switched to 4MB mode by 
LinuxBIOS. After that you can address that 4MB by FILO as mem at 0x....
- 4 digit LED display (POST code display + selftest)
- miniUSB (by ftdi chip) for the programming flash banks
- python script as programming tool

PCB is 8cm x 6cm, i have seen the case for that unit too :)

As much as I know this dongle were made available with initial price ca. 
€90 (in small quantities). I'd expect that such a thing (with somewhat 
different design) can't be much cheaper.

Indrek





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