Santa Clara, CA; Toronto, ON — (press release excerpt) — V3 Semiconductor Inc. has announced Linux support for developers of MIPS processor based embedded PCI applications. The new Linux Board Support Package (BSP) supports the V3 Hurricane Platform, which features the RM5231 Embedded MIPS Processor from PMC-Sierra and the V320USC Universal PCI System Controller from V3 Semiconductor. The Linux BSP will accelerate development of new MIPS based applications based on the Linux operating system.

Tom Riordan, Vice President and General Manager of PMC-Sierra's, MIPS Microprocessor Division, believes that: “Clearly, Linux support is becoming increasingly important to our customer base. Networking customers, in particular, are attracted to the robust, highly reliable characteristics of Linux, and recognize the development cycle time improvements that can be achieved.”

The V3 Linux BSP is available for free from V3 Semiconductor. The BSP is compatible with V3's Hurricane Platform, and includes software driver support for a variety of standard I/O peripherals, such as Ethernet, video, USB, IDE, and other devices. The BSP is delivered with complete documentation, including a readme file and an installation guide. The package can be freely downloaded, here.

The Hurricane Platform includes the PMC-Sierra RM5231 MIPS RISC processor along with V3's V320USC Universal PCI System Controller. The board comes in a half-size PCI host bus adapter form factor, and is fully compliant with the PCI Local Bus Spec, Rev 2.2. The Hurricane Board can be configured to work in the following modes: system master, PCI bus master and PCI bus target. The board also contains serial ports, parallel ports, 32 MB memory, Boot EEPROM, Flash, and a custom prototyping connector.

The V320USC includes an integrated SDRAM Memory Controller, 32-bit PCI Controller, 32-bit MIPS SysAD local processor interface, DMA Engines, an Interrupt Controller, Timers, and Serial Interfaces. The unique 3-bus architecture interconnecting the processor, the memory and the PCI buses achieves high performance, while allowing low-cost system expansion capability.

 
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