Hi All
I am please to announce that the V1.4-13 development version has just been released (
http://www.utasker.com/forum/index.php?topic=1252.0)
The intension was to add a certain amount of new features to the project, as well as adding basic support for the complete Kinetis faimily, but it ended up turning into a bit of a more intensive investigation effort to try to resolve some strange effects and instability problems encountered during final testing.
However I believe that the effort has been worth while because it was possible to make various (important) improvements, mainly involving working around some chip errata. The latest version now has much improved Ethernet stability on full and duplex 100M links. 10M operation is still not as good as it perhaps should be but this will be looked into more (although with the 100M stuff working nicely this may not have the highest priority). For some insight into some problems the following freescale foum threads may be of interest:
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http://forums.freescale.com/t5/Kinetis-ARM-Cortex-M4/K60-Ethernet-transmission-problem/td-p/87637-
http://forums.freescale.com/t5/Kinetis-ARM-Cortex-M4/MII-Management-channel-clock/td-p/87805It was quite a lot of work but now the port simulator supports all present Kinetis devices (K10, K20, K30, K40, K50, K51, K52, K53, K60) in 80/81, 100, 121 and 144 pin packages!
Ethernet IP performance has been improved by utilising the chip's IP acceleration capabilities (IP checksum offloading) and also the enhanced Ethernet buffer descriptor mode is available so IEEE 1588 work can be started on!
Although there are in fact quite a lot of new things, it is worth noting that the second-generation uFileSystem is integral to the Kinetis project with options to extend the number of files possible and also a new file append feature that supports the Kinetis flash characteristics.
The competition in the Cortex M4 segment is certainly hotting up, with ST Micro and Texas Instruments launching their Cortex M4F products (freescale will sample their M4F - with floating point - in November 2011). The Kinetis project is now developing more intensively as first users move into project production phases (rather than the initial evaluation period) so I expect an exciting time shortly for the project ;-)
Regards
Mark
