Name

eCos Support for the Embedded Artists LPC2468 OEM Board — Overview

Description

The Embedded Artists LPC2468 OEM Board is fitted with an NXP LPC2468 processor rated up to 72MHz, which contains 64KB of SRAM and 512KB of FLASH. When used in conjunction with the OEM base board, it provides access to two on-chip UARTs (one via USB, one via a 9-pin connector), a single GPIO LED, an MMC/SD card socket, and a PHY connected to the on-chip Ethernet MAC. Refer to the board documentation for full details.

Two variants of the LPC2468 OEM board are supported. The LPC2468-16 board provides a 16 bit data bus to external RAM, works with all versions of the base board, and supports UART 1. The LPC2468-32 board provides a 32 bit data bus to external RAM, works only with v1.4 and later versions of the base board, and does not allow UART 1 to be used.

For typical eCos development, a RedBoot image is programmed into the LPC2468 on-chip flash memory, and the board will boot this image from reset. RedBoot provides gdb stub functionality so it is then possible to download and debug stand-alone and eCos applications via the gdb debugger using either UART or via the ethernet.

This documentation describes platform-specific elements of the LPC2468 OEM Board support within eCos. Documentation on the NXP LPC2xxx variants is available separately, and should be read in conjunction with this documentation. The LPC2xxx documentation covers various topics including HAL support common to LPC2xxx variants, and on-chip device support. This document complements the LPC2xxx documentation.

Supported Hardware

The LPC2468 OEM Board has 512Kbyte of on-chip Flash memory. In a typical setup, RedBoot will load and run from this internal flash. An initial image must be programmed into this flash using either the FlashMagic utility, or via a JTAG debugger. Following this, it may be reprogrammed using flash drivers in RedBoot.

The first 64 bytes of on-chip SRAM are mapped by the HAL startup code using the LPC2468 memory mapping control to location 0x00000000 for speed of interrupt vector processing. The rest of SRAM is available for use by the application. 4MB of external NOR flash is available at 0x80000000; the topmost 64K of this is used by RedBoot for configuration data, the rest is available for application use and can be managed by RedBoot's flash file system. 32 MB of SDRAM is available at 0x81000000; the first 1MByte of this is reserved for use by RedBoot, the rest is available for the code and data of loaded applications.

The NXP LPC2xxx variant HAL includes support for the on-chip serial devices which is documented in the variant HAL. The interrupt-driven serial driver supports the line status and modem control (including hardware handshaking) lines on UART1 only.

The LPC2468 OEM Board port includes support for the on-chip watchdog, RTC (wallclock), and interrupt controller (VIC). This support is documented in the LPC2xxx variant HAL.

The on-chip Ethernet MAC is supported. The LPC2468-16 and LPC2468-32 use different PHYs, and both of these are supported.

The on-chip Multimedia Card Interface (MCI) is supported to allow access to Multimedia Cards (MMC) or Secure Digital (SD) cards using the socket on the OEM board.

Tools

The LPC2468 OEM Board port is intended to work with GNU tools configured for an arm-eabi target. Thumb mode is supported. The original port was done using arm-elf-gcc version 3.4.4, arm-elf-gdb version 6.3, and binutils version 2.16.