The Network Gateway Reference Design Kit, in short NGW100, is a fully equipped Linux evaluation system. It is pre-installed with a Linux-Image and many other useful applications. The microcontrollers interfaces are all supported by drivers and are physically linked to standard connectors. Atmel provides and maintains all driver and application software in source code as well. For Linux Newbie's this makes is much more easy to enter into the World of Linux.
The evaluation board is equipped with Atmel's new AVR32 AP7 RISC Application Processor which was designed to perform highest performance while the power consumption is less than other comparable systems.

Hardware & Software Configuration

The AVR32AP7000, a high performance RISC Processor with a lot of standard interfaces was design originally for PDA applications. But now specially for process visualization within industrial application where Linux is chosen as underlying OS, more and more applications are found.

• AVR32AP7000 RISC with MMU and Cache
• 32MByte SDRAM
• 8MByte parallele FLASH
• 8MByte Serial DataFlash®

• 2 x Fast Ethernet 10/100Mbit/s
• USB2.0 High Speed 480Mbit/s
• RS232 UART Terminal
• SD-Card Slot
• Nexus Class III connector, not mounted
• Header connector for GPIO‘s
• The LCD TTL-Interface can be adapted via header connectors

The pre-installed Linux-Image is placed into the NOR-Flash Memory where the /USR partition is redirected to the serial DataFlash®. Additional memory maybe allocated by using a SD-Card media extension. Part of the software is SAMBA which runs in the background and supports several functions of a Windows®-Server. This makes it possible to connect a Windows®-Client to this server application.

The NGW100 and the huge number of resources can be copied easily and my be used for AVR32 based own applications. The price of the board is € 79,- and is delivered as it is - without any additional hardware and software. All software resources are maintained on Atmel’s homepage and may be downloaded free of charge.

The AVR32 AP7 represents a new RISC Microcontroller Family which was designed for maximum system performance and lowest possible power consumption. With 1.38 Dhrystone MIPS/MHz this controller achieves regions which are normally engaged only by absolute high-end architectures. But a big advantage of AVR32 compared to those architectures is, that the power consumption was reduced dramatically and so this core is ideal for battery powered systems. The AVR32 core made-up by a 7-stage pipeline and further additional improvements which increased the overall system performance. New functions like „Branch Prediction“ or „Accumulator-Cache“ lead to higher performance and new patents on Atmel’s side as well. Additionally a standard Memory Management Unit and a Instruction- and Data Cache was implemented to let the controller run full fledged OS. The embedded Vector Multiplication Unit (VMU) supports video-streaming decoding and so software decoding functions are accelerated by hardware and do not reduce system performance.

The main advantage of the Network Reference Design Kit is the huge quantity of software which is available for free to everybody. The huge offer starts with the integrated development environment (IDE), the GNU Tool chain with GCC compiler and GDB Debugger, and the Board-Support-Package for the NGW100 which also contains the corresponding Linux-Image.

The Integrated Development Environment is found under the name AVR32 Studio on Atmel’s homepage and can be downloaded free of charge. The AVR32 Studio is based on the universal, platform independent Eclipse® IDE where specific plug-ins are used to intetgrate and adapt the final tool chain and user configuration. Atmel has done a really good job here by integrating the AVR32 GNU Toolchain with the GCC compiler and the GDB Debugger.

The JTAGICE-mkII is well known by AVR 8-Bit users. Now, with this tool it is also possible to program and debug the complete AVR32 AP7 and UC3 family. For those developer which already have this tool, they now have access to AVR32 too, without any additional cost. With the latest Firmware upgrade by the standard AVR Studio the debugger-support of AVR32 was added.

As already mentioned, the NGW100 is delivered with a pre-installed Linux System which is configured to work as a Network-Router. The integrated TCP/IP protocol stack, as well as all other software for driver and applications, are free of charge. The NGW100 can be used as a simple Web-Server where all related documentation is locally copied to the Flash file system and maybe viewed by browser.

For many developer which are new to Linux it is very difficult to find a simple entry to work with drivers, scripts and so on. More over, to compile kernels a dedicated know how is needed which takes a lot of time to be established. By adaptation of Buildroot to the Atmel AVR32 environment this time consuming learning phase is reduced dramatically. Buildroot is a set of scripts and menus which automatically generates the overall root file system for a given target. By doing this, the software checks versions of libraries and compilers and if they do not mach the requirements, the system is connecting to the www and automatically loads the correct version from. This reduced the needed know how for kernel compilation to a minimum requirement.