JTAG Expansion Board

Product Overview

PHYTEC expansion boards help minimize development kit complexity, while providing flexibility for applications that may require additional interface support.

One of the key advantages of a heterogenous, feature-rich application processor is that you can run a high-level operating system such as Linux on the main core cluster while offloading critical real-time tasks to the integrated microcontroller (MCU). Leveraging the various compute clusters can yield far simpler hardware designs when developing complex embedded systems because you can consolidate a lot of functionality into one chip.

Traditional embedded designs often use a Linux-based processor for TCP/IP cloud connectivity alongside a separate, external microcontroller (MCU) to handle time-critical tasks like motor control or sensor polling. While an external MCU is sometimes easier to certify for safety-critical applications, it inevitably increases board complexity and your Bill of Materials (BOM).

Moving to a heterogeneous processor, which integrates an Application Processor and an MCU co-processor on a single chip, can simplify hardware designs and reduce BOM costs, especially at volume. In this architecture, the integrated MCU continues to execute time-critical tasks with bare-metal, deterministic performance, completely independent of network availability. It then passes sensor data to Linux via shared memory, where it can be buffered and routed to the cloud, allowing you to take full advantage of Linux’s rich networking stack without compromising real-time reliability.

The JTAG Expansion Board can be connected to various PHYTEC development platforms providing JTAG access and enabling heterogeneous multi-core development.

What’s Included:

• PEB-EVAL-01 PHYTEC Expansion Board

Additional Features:

• UART port
• I2C EEPROM,
• User buttons
• LEDs

For more information on unlocking the Cortex®-M7 check out this application note.