ETRAX CRIS

The ETRAX CRIS is a series of CPUs 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.

The TGA (Twinax Gate Array), developed in 1986, was a communications transceiver for the AS/400 architecture.

The First chip with embedded microcontroller was the CGA-1 (Coax Gate Array) which contained booth IBM 3270 (coax) communications, AS/400 communications (Twinax). It also had a small microcontroller and various IO:s, including serial and parallel interfaces. The 1 chip was designed by Martin Gren, the bug-fixed CGA-2 by Martin Gren and Staffan Göransson.

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

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

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

In 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. Since it has a MMU, it can run the Linux kernel without modifications.

Main characteristics:

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

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).

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