Future Electronics has taken the concept of a distributor supplying an evaluation board a stage further by offering a multi-board development system supporting devices from a number of suppliers.
According to the company, evaluation boards designed for specific chips can be problematic when the user needs to link a number of boards together to prototype a system design.
It has proposed a technique using a common bus interface to plug in multiple development boards featuring components from different manufacturers.
Fred Knowles, v-p of technical sales at Future Electronics told EW the aim was to come up with a version of the evaluation system approach commonly used in the Asian market which works for industrial systems developers in Europe.
“Design engineers will be delighted to be rid of the so-called Christmas tree process of stringing multiple development boards together every time they start a new project,” said Knowles.
Called Future-Blox, the development boards will support third-party as well as proprietary development software as standard.
Based on a 120-pin (expandable to 160-pin) bus standard, the first is an Ethernet board featuring the Freescale Semiconductor MCF5208 32-bit microcontroller and National Semiconductor’s DP83848 Ethernet PHY. The second is the PowerNet board featuring the Freescale MCF52235 microcontroller and National Semiconductor LM5072 power-over-Ethernet controller.
According to Knowles, many of the distributor’s suppliers including ST, International Rectifier and Cypress, are supporting the approach and a further 10 boards for functions such as motor control, industrial processing and a touchscreen interface are very close to release.
The boards, together with associated reference designs, firmware and design files, will be supplied free to qualifying customers.