The ETRAX CRIS is a series of CPUs designed and manufactured by Axis Communications for use in embedded systems since 1993 The name is an acronym of the chip's features: Ethernet, Token Ring, AXis - Code Reduced Instruction Set. Token ring support has been taken out from the latest chips as it has become obsolete.

Types of chips

TGA-1

The TGA-1, developed in 1986, was a communications transceiver for the AS400 architecture.

CGA-1

The CGA-1 was just a performance improvement over the TGA-1.

CGA-2

CGA-3

ETRAX-1

In 1993, by introducing 10 MBit Ethernet and Token Ring controllers, the name ETRAX was born.

ETRAX-2

ETRAX-3

ETRAX-4

The ETRAX-4 had improved performance than previous models, along with a SCSI controller.

ETRAX 100

The ETRAX 100 features a 10/100 MBit Ethernet Controller (hence the name), along with ATA and Wide SCSI support.

ETRAX 100LX

In the year 2000, the ETRAX 100LX design added an MMU, as well as USB, synchronous serial and SDRAM support, and boosted the CPU performance up to 100 MIPS. Unlike devices with no MMU, it can run a Linux kernel with no modifications to the Linux memory management code.

It features:

• A 32 bit RISC CPU core
• 10/100 MBit Ethernet controller
• 4 asynchronous serial ports
• 2 synchronous serial ports
• 2 USB ports
• 2 Parallel ports
• 4 ATA (IDE) ports
• 2 Narrow SCSI ports (or 1 Wide)
• Support for SDRAM, Flash, EEPROM, SRAM

The device comes in a 256-pin Plastic Ball Grid Array package and uses 350 mW power (typical).

See also: http://www.axis.com/products/dev_etrax_100lx/index.htm

ETRAX 100LX MCM

This system-on-a-chip is an ETRAX 100LX plus flash memory, SDRAM, and an ethernet PHYceiver. There were two versions commercialized: the ETRAX 100LX MCM 2+8 (2 MB flash, 8 MB SDRAM), and the ETRAX MCM 4-16 (4 MB flash, 16 MB SDRAM).

See also: http://www.axis.com/products/dev_etrax_100lx_mcm/index.htm

ETRAX FS

Designed in 2005, and with full Linux 2.6 support, this chip features:

• A 200 MIPS, 32-bit RISC with 5 stage pipeline CRIS CPU core with 16 kB data and 16 kB instruction cache and a MMU.
• Two 10/100 Ethernet controllers
• Crypto accelerator, supporting AES, DES, 3DES, SHA-1 and MD5.
• 128 kB on-chip RAM
• A microprogrammable I/O processor, supporting PC-Card, CardBus, PCI, USB FS/HS host, USB FS device, SCSI and ATA.

The device comes in a 256-pin Plastic Ball Grid Array package and uses 465 mW power (typical).

See also: http://www.axis.com/products/dev_etrax_fs/index.htm

Development tools

Software

A Linux-based cross compiler is provided by Axis and can be downloaded from their website along with a range of sample applications. Pre-compiled images are also available.

Hardware

Several hardware manufacturers offer 'developer boards': a circuit board featuring an ETRAX chip and all the necessary I/O ports to develop (or even deploy) applications. These include:

• Axis Communications AXIS 82 developer board
• Embedded Linux PC' from ipcas
• ACME Systems' FOX board
• Elphel Reconfigurable Network Camera based on Etrax FS and Xilinx Spartan 3e FPGA
• Free2move's embedded Linux system
• Rcotel Corporation's single board Linux computer
• DSP&FPGA's industrial control unit
• BBDevice.com remote control systems

See also: http://developer.axis.com/old/showroom/index.html

External links

• http://developer.axis.com

SDK, how-tos, sample applications: http://www.acmesystems.it/?id=14