Phoenix, AZ — (press release excerpt) — VME board manufacturer ACTIS Computer has released a PowerQUICC II based single board computer that runs Embedded Linux and is targeted at the communication and embedded control market.

The VSBC-6862/LK uses on-board Flash memory and the PowerQUICC's dual Fast 10/100 Mbps Ethernet ports to boot Linux in one of two ways. In the Flash mode, the board will uncompress and copy the Linux kernel resident in Flash EPROM into local SDRAM. In the DHCP/BootP mode, the board will automatically locate, download and boot the Linux kernel over the network.

The VSBC-6862/LK's Linux BSP is a standard PowerPC version of the kernel and comes with drivers for the PowerQUICC's dual Ethernet ports (eth0, eth1), and support for the board's 6 built-in serial ports (ttyS0 to ttyS5). Also supported right off the box is a RAM-disk and the NFS file system for a seamless integration with other shared network resources such as remote disk drives. Users can easily customize the startup script to include additional features such as web and ftp server daemons, firewalls, and user programs. The Linux BSP for the VSBC-6862/LK comes complete with all the code and information needed to recompile and customize the kernel.

The VSBC-6862/LK is an improved version of ACTIS Computer's flagship VSBC-6862 board with a faster 200MHz processor, 32MBytes of on-board SDRAM, 8 Mbytes of FLASH and a full Master/Slave VME interface. The VSBC-6862/LK is powered by the Motorola PowerQUICC II: a processor that combines a PowerPC 603 CPU with a dedicated RISC communication engine. The board can be further expanded with a variety of I/O modules available from ACTIS Computer and 3rd parties using four on-board IP module (VITA-4) sockets supporting both 8 and 32 MHz modes with DMA capabilities.

 
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