Bridge and controller chip-vendor QuickLogic is demonstrating several finished products and reference designs powered by Linux, at CES this week in Las Vegas. The company's demo's include a portable media player, two portable navigation devices, and a TV-out subsystem with XY swap for TV-enabled mobile phones.

QuickLogic specializes in I/O companion chips for embedded processors such as Marvell's (formerly Intel's) PXA270. Its chips are based on tiny, ultra-low-power FPGAs (field-programmable gate arrays), and often offer user programmability. The chips can be used to easily add hard drives and peripherals without greatly increasing the power budget, the company claims.

QuickLogic also recently shipped an Eclipse II line of tiny, Linux-friendly FPGAs optimized for low power consumption.

QuickLogic's CES demo's
Power Demo Board (Click to enlarge)	Mainstone DVK Demos Mainstone DVK with LAN (Click to enlarge)	Mainstone DVK Demos Mainstone DVK with Wireless LAN (Click to enlarge)
Colibri2MAB IDE Demo Mobile Applications Board (MAB) (Click to enlarge)	CE-ATA/SDIO Demo Smartphone Marvell PXA3xx Reference Design (Click to enlarge)	Alioth Demo Intel PXA270 with QuickLogic IDE Storage Solution (Click to enlarge)
Analog Devices Demo PMP+Mobile TV+ PND Architecture (Click to enlarge)

QuickLogic's Linux-based CES demo's, according to the company, include:

• Reference design for a PMP (portable media player) based on a Marvell PXA270, along with a QuickLogic PCI bridge chip enabling the connection of a hard drive, an UltraWideBand networking module, and an HSDPA (high-speed downlink packet access) cellular baseband
• A Magellan GPS system based on a Marvell PXA270, which connects to an external hard disk drive via a QuickLogic “HDD companion” chip, said to feature an “elegant DMA algorithm” that reduces processor bus utilization
• A Linux-based kiosk from Alioth that displays movie content. The demo is based on a Marvell PXA270, and uses QuickLogic's “drop-in IDE system,” said to include an HDD companion chip and Linux drivers

Additionally, QuickLogic is using Windows CE to demonstrate a TV-out subsystem that also supports Linux. The subsystem features XY swap, and targets mobile phones that need to quickly switch between portrait and landscape modes, for example to support television.

A whitepaper by Viosoft founder Hieu Tran about using QuickLogic bridge chips to interface PCI-based peripherals to Marvell PXA27x chips is available here.

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