ETRAX CRIS


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

The TGA, developed in 1986, was a communications transceiver for the AS/400 architecture.
The First chip with embedded microcontroller was the CGA-1 which contained both IBM 3270 communications and AS/400 communications. 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.

ETRAX

In 1993, by introducing 10 Mbit/s Ethernet and Token Ring controllers, the name ETRAX was born.
The ETRAX-4 had improved performance over previous models and an SCSI controller.
The ETRAX 100 features a 10/100 Mbit/s Ethernet Controller along with ATA and Wide SCSI support.

ETRAX 100LX

In 2000, the ETRAX 100LX design added an MMU, as well as USB, synchronous serial and SDRAM support. Its CPU performance was raised to 100 MIPS. Since it has an MMU, it could run the Linux kernel without modifications. As of Linux kernel 4.17 the architecture has been dropped due to being obsolete.
Main characteristics:
The device comes in a 256-pin Plastic Ball Grid Array package and uses power.

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, and the ETRAX MCM 4-16.

ETRAX FS

Designed in 2005, and with full Linux 2.6 support, this chip features:
The device comes in a 256-pin Plastic Ball Grid Array package and uses 465 mW power.

Development tools

Software

A SDK is provided by Axis on the .

Hardware

Several hardware manufacturers offer developer boards: a circuit board featuring an ETRAX chip and all the necessary I/O ports to develop applications. These include:
In April 2018 it was announced that Linux would stop supporting this architecture.