The TS-4500 is a low profile credit card sized Macrocontroller module and features a Cavium SOC with a 250 MHz Arm9™ core and a 5000 LUT Lattice FPGA. With 64MB RAM and a bootable 256MB on-board flash drive with our new XNAND technology, the TS-4500 is a powerful and extremely reliable embedded solution. External devices can connect to the TS-4500 via Ethernet, USB host, USB device, or I2C ports as well as DIO, UARTs, and SPI which are implemented in the standard FPGA load. The two 100 pin downward-facing general-purpose headers make it easy to interface the TS-4500 with the TS-8200 baseboard or a baseboard of your own design.

The standard TS-4500 configuration implements the following features:

• 53 3.3V GPIOs on TS-SOCKET interface
• 3-8 TTL XUART* serial ports
• 1 CAN controller (requires offboard transceiver)
• DMX Support
• SPI Support
• I2C Support
• Watchdog Timer
• Real-Time Clock (off-board battery)
• Temperature Sensor
• 256Mbyte onboard XNAND flash drive preloaded with Debian Linux

For a list of compatible TS-SOCKET baseboards, refer to the product compatibility chart.

Does your application require custom real-time logic such as non-standard bus interfaces, PWM outputs, quadrature decoding, pulse timing, or digital counters? embeddedTS can integrate that functionality into a custom TS-4500 FPGA configuration for an elegant and affordable solution.

TS-SOCKET Description

TS-SOCKET is an embedded computer standard designed and controlled by embeddedTS. It defines both a form factor and a connection pin-out and is based on two 100-pin low-profile connectors, allowing secure connection between a Macrocontroller (CPU board) and a baseboard. Please refer to the TS-SOCKET Standard and Embedded Macrocontrollers resource for more information.

Differences between TS-4500 and TS-75XX

The TS-4500 is a Macrocontroller module version of the TS-75XX Cavium Arm9 CPU/Lattice XP2 core. This board is low profile and about the size of a credit card, but includes no connectors/jacks except for the pair of 100 pin high density board to board connectors. Like the TS-7552/TS-7553, this module has both the 256MB on-board flash and microSD socket.

XNAND Technology

embeddedTS XNAND technology is an ultra reliable and industrial grade user-space device driver that uses Reed-Solomon codes, extra checksums, and a RAID based technique to allow any Linux filesystem to be used with confidence on SLC NAND flash. Our TS-BOOTROM can also boot from XNAND for an ultra-reliable bootup. Please refer to the XNAND whitepaper for more information.

* embeddedTS XUART core is an extended UART core supporting 7, 8, 9, or 10 bits per character, Tx and Rx FIFOs 256+ characters deep, and accurate measurement of idle and busy times. These ports support advanced protocols such as DMX/RDM.

The TS-4500 SBC boots to Linux 2.6.24 from either a microSD card or on-board XNAND drive. The 256MB on-board XNAND drive is enough to store a bootable kernel image, initial ramdisk image, and a minimal version of Debian "Lenny" Linux. Storage memory can be expanded through the microSD card socket. A bootable microSD card must contain a Linux kernel image, a initial ramdisk image and a valid Linux root filesystem. The fast Linux bootup solution was optimized for speed and includes kernel, initrd and filesystem (Busybox) tweaks. Since this board boots to an initrd (initial ram disk) with a read-only mounted filesystem, it is possible to have something other than a shell prompt running after bootup by editing the /linuxrc shell script on the initrd. Additional TS-4500 software features include:

• Boots Linux 2.6.24 out-of-the-box in less than 3 seconds (to a shell prompt).
• MicroSD card pre-installed with minimal Debian "Lenny" Linux distribution.
• Un-brickable design ensures 100% recoverability from microSD card in case of onboard XNAND drive erasure.
• Startup Linux mini-root scripts allows flexible root and backup filesystem selection (MicroSD, NFS, USB flash) as well as software field upgrade support.

Linux OS and Debian Support

embeddedTS's TS-4500 Arm Single Board Computers (SBC) are compatible with a wide range of Operating Systems (OS's). The Linux choice is highly recommended and our products are totally integrated with the open-source vision. The boards ships with Linux 2.6.24 kernel running out-of-the-box. There is no proprietary source code in the kernel since all the hardware specific functionalities are handled by user-space utilities. The Linux kernel includes driver support for on-board hardware, enabling quick time to market of end-users applications. Examples and source codes are also available for downloading.

The compact initial ramdisk filesystem is based on Busybox and uClibc and is improved for performance and flexibility. Specific Linux scripts and utilities that handle the TS-4500 functions are included. In addition, the full Debian binaries and services are available from the initial ramdisk after mounting the microSD card.

The TS-4500 macrocontrollers are configured to load Debian "Lenny" Linux from the on-board XNAND drive or microSD card during boot up time. The on-board XNAND flash uses a minimal Debian "Lenny" Linux distribution that has been compacted to fit in the 256MB space and leave about 70MB free for the user and includes utilities such as apt-get for installing and removing programs. The microSD card uses a full featured Debian "Lenny" Linux distribution which includes a complete GNU C/C++ embedded development environment. In addition, Apache Web Server, FTP, SSH, Telnet and Samba network services are available with C/PHP/Perl for embedded CGI development.

CAN Bus Support in User Space

The TS-4500 utilizes an SJA1000C-compatible FPGA core out of the box complete with documentation and sample code. The sample code provides a simple utility to send/receive CAN packets and perform useful and common functions with the CAN bus from userspace. Additionally, this sample code includes network CAN service and can be automatically started on TS-4500 bootup which makes the writing of CAN enabled applications even simpler and furthermore allows for the possibility of development in languages other than C (Java, Python, etc..) and on systems other than the local Linux SBC (Linux/x86, Windows, etc..)

Please contact embeddedTS for further information regarding Operating System and software support for this product.

Detailed Feature List

• TS-SOCKET Standard (requires Baseboard for development)
• 250MHz Arm9 CPU
• 64MB DDR-RAM
• 256MB SLC XNAND Drive
• 1 MicroSD Card Slot
• Customizable 5K LUT OpenCore FPGA
• 2 USB Host, 1 USB Device Ports
• 10/100 Ethernet Port (Magnetics Req.)
• 3 UARTS with CAN Bus, or 8 UARTS
• 53 DIO with I2C, SPI, UARTs, Auto-485
• Watchdog Timer
• DMX Support
• Real Time Clock and Temp. Sensor
• 6-channel 16-bit A/D converter
  (Functionality provided by Baseboards)
• Fanless Operation from -20 °C to 70 °C
• Credit Card Sized (55mm x 75mm)
• Low Power (400mA @ 5V)
• Unbrickable, Boots from SD or Flash
• Boots Linux 2.6 in less than 3 seconds
• DevKit includes base-board
• Compatible with TS-9445 console board
• Supports tsinit self-customization