TI AM3358 ARM with a TI ADS5474

Austin McElroy1

Other Parts Discussed in Thread: AM3358, ADS5474, OMAP3530

Howdy,

I was looking at getting a Beagle Board xM with the TI AM3358 ARM processor and building a daughter board that has an ADS5474. The Beagle Board would probably be running an Ubuntu flavor Linux kernel with a 400MHz external clock running to the ADS5474. The Data Ready pin on the ADS5475 would be configured as an interrupt Digital Input on the ARM; once fired, the 14 bits would be read in off the ADS5474 through 14 additional digital input lines.

Processing would either be done on the DSP chip or just piped out through USB or ethernet if the interrupt configuration is to taxing on the processor. Has anyone done anything similar to this or does there appear to be any pitfalls (besides board layout issues) in the plan? Is it feasible to expect the Ubuntu Linux kernel to keep up with the datarates from the ADS5474, or will another OS (alternate Linux, RTOS, etc) be needed?

The ultimate goal is going to be a low cost, open source (hopefully!) front end for optical imaging systems, though it could be used for anything that fits the bandwidth specs.

Thanks in advance for any input!

Austin

over 12 years ago

0 Cvetolin Shulev-XID over 12 years ago

TI__Guru 65405 points

Hi Austin,

The keeping up with the data rates from the ADS5474 depends more from the software implementation which you are using to handle it then from the choice of OS.

Tsvetolin Shulev

0 Austin McElroy1 over 12 years ago in reply to Cvetolin Shulev-XID

Prodigy 110 points

Hey Tsvetolin,

Thanks for the reply. It will 100% be a C/C++ implementation of interrupt polling based on the great tutorials of Derek Molly from Dublin University (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaIpz00lE84&list=UUf_sAmhBw7Tj7-2ujmLFoQg&index=3&feature=plcp).

As a slight follow-up, how many cores/threads are able to run at once on the OMAP3530? It would be nice to have a producer/consumer type program each running in their own threads.

Thanks,

Austin

0 Cvetolin Shulev-XID over 12 years ago in reply to Austin McElroy1

TI__Guru 65405 points

The OMAP3530 has one ARM core. The maximum number of threads is defined by the PTHREAD_THREADS_MAX macro, but this value is very big. The real limitation of maximum number of simultaneously running threads is depending of the volume of RAM. Each running thread has own stack which by default is between 2 MB and 8 MB, but this strongly depends of the kernel which you are using.

0 Austin McElroy1 over 12 years ago in reply to Cvetolin Shulev-XID

Prodigy 110 points

Hi Tsvetolin,

Thanks again for the response. You mentioned that the the software configuration was important to keep up with the data rates of the ADS5474. However, it seems like if the BeagleBoard-xM is running at 1GHz and the ADC is running at 400MHz, there are only 2 - 3 clock cycles to work with the data, so the only thing the board would be doing is collecting data. There would be no time to process or parse the data off the chip.

Does TI offer any multi-core ARM processor development boards with chips at faster clock rates?

Thanks,

Austin

0 Cvetolin Shulev-XID over 12 years ago in reply to Austin McElroy1

TI__Guru 65405 points

The TI offers more powerful development platform - PandaBoard ES based on the OMAP4460 dual-core ARM® Cortex™-A9 processor.

More details and specifications about PandaBoard ES you could read on the following link:

http://pandaboard.org/content/platform

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TI AM3358 ARM with a TI ADS5474