Axis Developer Solutions

Axis has been designing chips for 20 years, always with networking in mind. Our chips have been used in OEM solutions for companies like Canon and Hewlett-Packard in high volume applications.

We have the unique position of being a single source provider of a few very key components that you need when you start a new product design. Traditionally you buy a chip from one manufacturer, get support for it from a second, buy the operating system from a third, and the compiler from the fourth company. This can cause conflicts that you have no control over when you run into problems.

Axis provides all these components:

• ASIC - ETRAX family of system-on-chip processors
• Operating system - We maintain our own Linux distribution for the ETRAX processor
• Compiler & Debugger - We maintain the support for ETRAX in the Gnu C Compiler
• Support - We provide support for all components

Since we use the same components for almost all of our own products, you can rest assured that we have a very strong incentive that all these components work well together. 

Processors designed to run Linux

ETRAX 100LX was our first processors we specifically designed with Linux in mind. We added a MMU (Memory Management Unit) since that is required by the Linux kernel in order to be fully compatible with Linux. Before we had the MMU, we had to use a version of Linux called uClinux.

The advantage of running the real Linux

The advantage comes from removing limitations that uClinux has. Since uClinux has no MMU support, it cannot handle common function calls such as fork() properly. There are many more examples. Since many applications use these functions that work differently, they have to be modified to work with uClinux. It is simply more work involved in porting an application to work with uClinux.

When you run the real Linux 2.4 kernel on your embedded processor, it is more like running on a standard Linux PC. You use the same kernel and the same supporting libraries. If the application works on your PC, it'll work on the embedded processor.

The advantage results in faster development and time to market for your new product.

Support and Services

Our main goal is to sell chips. The operating system and development environment is provided for free. Our support packages will be enough to help you get your product to the market. Our experienced engineers will help you, regardless if your problems are in the OS, the HW drivers or with the compiler.