Taipei, Taiwan — (press release excerpt) — Esfia announced today that its AESF901PWD multifunction companion chip and embedded Linux operating system and tool chain have been incorporated into a new reference design for Samsung's S3C44B0X and S3C2400/2410 system-on-chip processors. The new reference design will be unveiled this week at the Taipei Linux Expo in the Taipei World Trade Center.

Esfia created the AESF901PWD companion chip and associated embedded Linux OS to help companies accelerate the development and production of powerful, scaleable, feature-rich, and lower-cost handheld products. The Esfia companion chip, which is designed to interface easily with the Samsung S3C44B0X and S3C2400/2410 system-on-chip processors, adds the following functions . . .

• CompactFlash Type I and Type II interface
• USB slave port for synchronization
• Audio codec with stereo audio real-time encoding
• General purpose I/O

The chip enables high-quality audio playback across the widest range of bit rates, offering cost-saving advantages to OEMs to cut costs by potentially using smaller drives that still provide high quality.

The S3C44B0X is based on a 66 MHz 16/32-bit ARM7TDMI RISC microprocessor and integrates: 8KB cache, optional internal SRAM, LCD controller, 2-channel UART with handshake, 4-channel DMA, System manager (chip select logic, FP/ EDO/SDRAM controller), 5-channel timers with PWM, I/O ports, RTC, 8-channel 10-bit ADC, IIC-BUS interface, IIS-BUS interface, Sync. SIO interface and PLL for clock. The S3C44B0X was developed using a ARM7TDMI core, 0.25 um CMOS standard cells, and a memory compiler.

The S3C2410X01 is based on a 16/32-bit ARM920T RISC microprocessor and integrates: separate 16KB Instruction and 16KB Data Cache, MMU to handle virtual memory management, LCD controller (STN & TFT), NAND Flash Boot loader, System Manager(chip select logic, SDRAM controller), 3-ch UART with handshake, 4-ch DMA, 4-ch Timers with PWM, I/O Ports, RTC, 8-ch 10-bit ADC and Touch screen interface, IIC-BUS interface, IIS-BUS interface, USB Host, USB Device, SD Host & Multi-Media Card Interface, 2-ch SPI and PLL for clock generation.

Esfia's Embedded Linux support for the S3C44B0X is currently based on Linux kernel version 2.2.14 but will soon shift to 2.4.x, while that for the S3C2410 is already based on kernel version 2.4.x. The Linux support includes an embeddable GUI framework which is based on Nano-X.

Schematics of the AESF901PWD companion chip reference design are now available for download to consumer electronics OEMs, handheld manufacturers, and content and service providers.

 
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