The proliferation of interface and communication standards from industry to industry has made it difficult to get systems talking to each other. A configurable low-cost board solves the problem.

Tough economic conditions and cost sensitivity are making it difficult for designers of commercial and industrial equipment to provide the one feature customers request most – network connectivity. Network connectivity and the ability to manage systems from a Web interface are highly valued. But implementing them has remained elusive because companies do not want to design them in as a standard feature during an economic downturn.

Technovare’s Network Enabled Processor™ (NEP) board shown in Figure 1 provides an off-the-shelf solution to this dilemma by letting system designers integrate networking into their feature set quickly and without the expense of an additional design cycle.

The NEP board integrates an embedded Web server that performs all of the processing and services required for network connectivity such as TCP/IP, SNMP, HTTP, Telnet, and FTP. A key enabling feature of the NEP board is a user-definable interface implemented by a Xilinx Spartan™ FPGA.

The Spartan FPGA’s flexibility and configurability allows host systems to communicate with the NEP board using any digital format, protocol, or standard. Standard interfaces such as RS-232 and RS-485 are available on all versions of the NEP board. Once TCP/IP processing has taken place, data can be sent out over a standard network connection consisting of a single 10/100 BaseT Ethernet port.

Cores for many parallel and serial interfaces such as I 2 C, SDLC, EPP, USB, and CAN are available and can be integrated on request.

In addition to providing you with a network-connectivity solution, the NEP board is also a generic processing platform that can offload your host system of computing overhead and even run an entire embedded application. Equipped with Motorola’s 5272 Coldfire™ 32-bit RISC processor, Wind River Systems’ VxWorks™ RTOS, 4 Mbytes of SDRAM, and 16 MB of flash RAM, the NEP board is a formidable processing platform for many embedded applications. Its primary features are shown in Table 1.

Table 1 - NEP board features

Programmable interface implemented by Spartan FPGA 10/100 BaseT Ethernet interface Dual UART interfaces for RS-232 and RS-485 to support serial data transmission, translation, and control USB1.1 interface transmits up to 12 Mbps serial data 4 MB SDRAM, 16 MB flash memory 32-bit Motorola ColdFire™ microprocessor VxWorks™ real-time operating system with embedded TCP/IP stack Remote configuration and in-circuit firmware update capability PC/104 form factor.

Solving Problems for Diverse Applications

Most commercial and industrial applications have developed their own set of standards, protocols, and communication interfaces based upon their own unique requirements.

CAN is widely used in the industrial-automation market, for example, and two-wire communication is widely used in building-automation applications. The convergence of industry-specific communications protocols such as these with IP-based Ethernet has created a large number of nodes in which translation from one network to another is required.

The NEP board is ideal for these applications. It provides pre-configured communications interfaces for many standard protocols as well as the ability to create custom interfaces for ones that do not already exist. Its interface translation capability between UART and 10/100 BaseT Ethernet permits easy integration into existing computer and control systems.

As systems mature and more features are added, you will find the communication protocol that you employ most frequently is often not sufficient to handle the system’s bandwidth requirements. To address this problem, the NEP board incorporates a high-speed Ethernet connection. Systems that are now communicating over low-speed interfaces such as RS-232 can easily migrate to IP-based Ethernet.

The NEP board’s unique user-defined interface allows applications to take full advantage of 10/100 BaseT Ethernet data rates by allowing parallel and high-speed serial connectivity to the host system.

Just as every industry has its own communications protocol, every system usu-ally has its own user interface. The proliferation of interfaces generally requires user-interface software on the host computer that communicates with the system via RS-232, USB, or some other standard interface. Any other host computer wanting to communicate with the system must first be loaded with the interface software and be directly connected to the system.

This problem is alleviated with the NEP board’s embedded Web server. Any host computer with a Web browser can log into the system from any location on the entire Internet – with proper authorization – and have access to the user interface that runs on the NEP board.

Equipped with a 32-bit RISC processor, 4 MB of SDRAM, and 16 MB of flash memory, the NEP board’s Web server can serve sophisticated Web pages consisting of HTML-based pages and Java script. For systems that require more memory space, a PCMCIA expansion card will be available shortly.

Conclusion

The NEP board delivers a user-friendly, Web-based interface that creates network connectivity to everyday existing systems. The board’s affordable price – about $150 for 1,000-unit orders – lets system designers integrate their applications into existing and future systems without affecting cost or product delivery schedules. For more information, visit Technovare’s website at www.technovare.com.

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