LinkUp announces L7200 platform now supports Symbian

SANTA CLARA, California - February 9th, 2000 - One week before Symbian's first US Developer Conference takes place in Santa Clara, USA, LinkUp Systems Corporation and Symbian today announced co-operation to bring to market a system-enabling solution based on LinkUp’s L7200 hardware platform and the Symbian platform. This solution is targeted towards system OEMs developing Wireless Information Devices based on Symbian's pen-based communicator reference design.

The highly integrated system chip, L7200, is optimized to run on the Symbian platform. The L7200 incorporates an ARM720T processor core which features 8kbyte cache, write buffer, memory management unit, together with several highly integrated system peripherals as well as an integrated DSP with it’s own instruction cache.

The L7200 is designed to satisfy the needs of the system designers who require high performance at a very low cost and minimum power dissipation. Extensive on-chip power management makes the L7200 a device of choice for Wireless Information Devices such as pen and keyboard based Communicators and Smartphones. High performance color LCD support allows application in upscale phones and web browsing. The on-chip DSP co-processor provides efficient execution of signal processing tasks such as audio compression, JPEG compression, and MP3 decode. The DSP results in significant power savings as compared to native-signal processing on the CPU, which demands very high clock frequency for these tasks. The Thumb® mode of the ARM CPU allows high code density reducing ROM/Flash size, thus saving system cost.

The L7200 supports the major standards of mass storage (PC Card, CompactFlash™, MultiMediaCard, and Smart Card) making the device ideal for applications requiring storage and playback of audio (digital answering machine), music (MP3 player), and voice messages. The versatile storage facility can also be used for downloading of e-mail from the Internet for later-on review.

An 8-channel DMA controller supports the transfer between system memory and the rich set of on-chip peripheral controllers. These communication controllers include two UARTs, slow/medium/fast IrDA support, master/slave synchronous serial port (SSP), and SPI™.

"We're supporting the Symbian platform as this leading technology is the platform of choice for wireless device manufacturers," said Ravi Bhatnagar, President and CEO, LinkUp Systems Corporation. "We believe that the combination of the LinkUp L7200 low-power high-performance system architecture and the Symbian platform makes the L7200 an ideal device for a host of applications such as smart cellular phones, wireless email terminals, and other web-based mobile devices. The availability of the Symbian port to L7200 helps create new market opportunities and many new innovative products."

The L7200 comes with complete development system support and integrated debug environment. The development system consists of L7200EVAL development board. The system includes Symbian port, software drivers, and OEM Adaptation Kit (OAK). To aid the software development, LinkUp provides low-level driver API (L7200API) in source form. A complete software toolkit (L7200TLK), which is optimized for on-chip DSP co-processor, is also available. The debug environment consists of an ARM debug monitor and Multi-ICE™ In-Circuit Emulator through JTAG interface.

"LinkUp Systems’ L7200’s high integration accompanied with low-power usage make it ideal for Wireless Information Devices," commented Juha Christensen, Executive Vice President, Symbian. "The availability of the Symbian platform on L7200 is another step forward in making Symbian the platform of choice for mobile computing and telecommunications manufacturers. Being able to adopt proven technology when selecting key components at the start of product development is a great advantage for them. It reduces their development risk, and allows them to focus 100 percent on adding their own unique features to the product, which become real benefits for the end user. It enables them to bring real cost-effective and innovative products to market in a significantly shorter time-scale."

Samples of L7200 are available now with production targeted for March 2000. The L7200 Evaluation System, L7200 Toolkit, and L7200 API are available now from LinkUp Systems.


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