Atom N270 and Mobile 945GSE Dev Kit

There are various Intel Atom Development Kits available form numerous vendors. The range spans different processor specifications and configuration of hardware supplied. Their intended use varies considerably.

The development kits are generally targeted at supporting the development on specific hardware platforms that will be bought in by the OEM, although some are intended to support the development of OEM’s own carrier HW.  

This kit is intended as a development platform with the OEM needing to develop own HW. However, I would consider it more of an evaluation board for determining chipset performance and power consumption rather than a suitable platform for starting a specific embedded product development.

As with any development kit, it is important to be able to get up and running as quickly as possible and to be able to obtain technical support from the vendor or manufacturer.

This kit came with no printed documentation. All supplied information being contained on the included CDROM. The CD also contains various drivers for both Linux and Windows although for most some later versions were available form the Intel Website. This is in a way inevitable and in any case most drivers etc. will have been revised since the release of the hardware.

However, some of the web links in the CD documentation did not work and a snoop around the Intel site was required to locate them. Others, as for example, the link to the Reflash Software Tool were a general link to the AMI website and also required some time to locate the exact SW. For some information the statement “Contact your FAE for the latest revision” did not inspire confidence in being able to get up and running quickly.

The development motherboard itself is pre-configured and supplied in a good quality closed mini-itx chassis/case. Whilst this offers good protection to the electronics, I feel it is not the best setup in a development environment where access needs to be gained easily. A more ‘open’ setup would have been preferred. The case also contains an 80GB SATA HD and a DVD ROM Drive. A 1 GB DDR2 SODIMM is included. The HD is preloaded with Suse 10 Enterprise. This requested a password on boot. Since there was no printed documentation it took a while to find the file on the CD which gives the default username and password (root and root). The PSU is external and is supplied with socket adapters for international use.

All in all, getting the kit up and running was straight forward, requiring only addition of a  monitor, mouse and keyboard.

The kit includes pre-installed EFI firmware with major operating systems support.

Some of the features that differentiate this motherboard form a end-user one you may purchase for your home entertainment PC are:

The motherboard provides resistors for sub-system power measurement support. Very useful for evaluating potential battery operated embedded system power requirements.

XDP Debug interface.

Socketed BIOS Flash -  but it should be noted that the provided BIOS is intended as a reference only and for the embedded application an alternative will need to be sourced.

Other comments:

The PCI slot is unpopulated. No socket is fitted.  I would have liked to use a legacy PCI card but the documentation statement did not make it clear how the board needs to be modified in order to use PCI (other than populating a connector). I guess I will find out in due course.

PCIe x1 slot has a non standard location so larger cards will foul other system components. The motherboard would have to be used outside the chassis.

Full HW schematics would have been useful. Maybe they are somewhere on the CD but I haven’t found them yet.

In summary:

I’m sure this kit will perform as intended. Overall it is of very high quality. It just could be somewhat better documented and thought out  to make life that little bit easier for the developer.