Our customer is USA based company developing products for networked management systems.

Project Overview

The product was based on IXP Network processor. The development was spread over phases and it involved:

• Development of Manufacturing Diagnostic application
• Driver development for peripherals
• Developing network management application

Manufacturing Diagnostic Application

Manufacturing diagnostics application was developed to verify the hardware. The application verified availability of all the peripherals (internal and external) and their functionality. The system had on-chip peripherals like SDRAM, Flash, UART, PRO/SLIC, Network Processor Engines, USB, PCI, and Mini-PCI. After successful diagnostics, appropriate operating system is loaded. ADI Coyote Residential Gateway was used as a reference design for developing the application.

Block diagram of Manufacturing Diagnostics

eInfochips' role

• Develop RedBoot RAM image with eCos support
• Port and integrate Intel libraries to eCos
• Develop Manufacturing Diagnostics, Similar to POST (power on self test) with functionality tests
• Perform diagnostics for internal and external peripherals available on the boards

Challenges

As JTAG was not available on ADI Coyote reference board, the manufacturing diagnostics application was developed as a loadable module

Intel libraries were essential to access various peripherals like Pro/SLIC, Network Processing Engines. These libraries only support VxWorks and Linux as operating system.

eInfochips' team used eCos (Embedded Configurable Operating System) and ported Intel libraries. eCos based approach involved rebuilding RedBoot boot loader, porting Intel libraries to eCos platform, developing manufacturing diagnostics for eCos platform.

Customer Benefits

• eInfochips helped the customer in coming up with manufacturing diagnostics test requirements and tests that can run on customer hardware
• Approach suggested from eInfochips feasibility study and alternate approaches benefited customer in accomplishing full fledged diagnostics of the hardware
• Modular and extendible approach, allowed other OS to load after completion of manufacturing diagnostics and run the application