Mouser Electronics, Inc. is now stocking and shipping the Atmel SAMA5D3 Xplained Evaluation Kit, a low cost prototyping board for the Atmel SAMA5D3 family of processors based on the ARM Cortex-A5 processor core. The board supports an external LCD interface, Gigabit Ethernet, and Arduino-R3 expansion headers.
The Atmel SAMA5D3 Xplained Evaluation Kit is Atmel’s latest in a series of SAMA5D3 evaluation boards. This SAMA5D3 Xplained kit allows developers to evaluate the high level features of the SAMA5D3 processor. The board comes with 256Mbytes DDR2 DRAM, 256Mbytes NAND Flash, and has an SD card connector and a microSD™ slot. An LCD interface connector is supported by an LCD TFT controller with touchscreen capabilities. Two Ethernet connectors are available, one for 10/100 and the other for Gigabit Ethernet. There are two USB host ports as well as one micro-AB USB connector. The board also has a set of Arduino-R3 compatible expansion connectors that can connect to compatible Arduino™ shields. The board is powered by USB or can use an external 5VDC power supply. Full schematics and extensive documentation include reference pinouts for the standard USB and microSD contacts.
The Atmel SAMA5D3 family of processors are based on the ARM Cortex-A5 core and run as fast as 536MHz at under 200mW. The Cortex-A5 targets high performance, low power consumer applications that require fast data processing. The ARM Cortex-A5 CPU core has a 64-bit internal bus with a high performance memory architecture including cache memory and the on-chip memory management unit. With these advantages, the SAMA5D3 easily runs high level operating systems such as Linux.
Software support comes with a free Linux distribution package that includes Linux Kernel 3.10 and Linux Mainline. Yocto 1.5.1 is also supported, allowing developers to create their own custom Linux distribution.
