Tech First Kit-Freescale-MPC8349E-MITX-GP-MPU-EVK

The MPC8349e-MITX-GP Industrial Evaluation platform not only demonstrates the capabilities of Freescale's MPC8349E processor but is an ideal solution for evaluating Freescale's Power™ Architecture Processors and software development around Power™ Architecture. This evaluation platform is specifically for customers who are NOT familiar with Power Architecture, to gain hands on experience.

In addition to the highly integrated MPC8349E processor, this platform leverages external components to support these additional features such as a Gigabit Ethernet port, a high-speed USB port, serial channels and a PCI slot. The ability to provide a wide variety of interfaces and implement an array of industrial protocols has become important in industrial applications because it increases design versatility and compatibility, a requirement in the wide space of the Industrial arena. Additionally the Power Architecture technology melds more than 15 years of architectural evolution which has allowed Freescale to provide market altering solutions with long product life cycles. Handing customers the capability to increase features without repeated investment due to product compatibility.

A board support package (BSP) is pre-installed on the MPC8349E-mITX-GP. This BSP consists of a bootloader (u-boot), a generic PPC Linux-based system and associated file system. U-boot and the Linux kernel reside in the on-board Flash memory while the File system is pre-installed on the hard disk shipped with the MPC8349E-mITX-GP. Upon power up, the Linux system is running on the MPC8349E-mITX-GP.

The MPC8349E-mITX-GP BSP generation takes advantage of a tool called the Linux Target Image Builder or LTIB. LTIB is a suite of tools that leverages existing Open Source configuration scripts and source code packages and bundles them all into a single BSP generation bundle. The source code packages include boot loaders and linux kernel sources as well as many user-space source code packages to build a complete BSP. LTIB also provides compiler packages required to build the BSP. Freescale developers use LTIB to create BSPs for a multitude of Freescale development targets. LTIB leverages as much BSP elements as possible for all Freescale targets that supported while offering the flexibility required to customize, as necessary, components that require platform specific modifications.