OSADL welcomes its new member Texas Instruments

By: Carsten Emde

TI's commitment to Open Source

OSADL is glad to announce that Texas Instruments is now a part of the OSADL community.

Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI) is a global semiconductor company headquartered in Dallas, Texas, USA, but with design, sales and manufacturing operations in more than 30 countries. TI is known for providing innovative semiconductor technologies to help its customers create the world's most advanced electronics. With more than 25,000 TI employees worldwide, the company generated $12.5B (US) in 2008. TI has 25 years experience in Digital Signal Processors (DSPs) and 50 years experience in analog technology.

TI’s broad portfolio of analog and embedded processing products includes ARM^®-based processors such as Stellaris^® Cortex-M3™, Sitara™ family of ARM9™ and Cortex-A8 processor-based microprocessors, DaVinci™ video processors, OMAP™ mobile applications processors, DSPs, and microcontrollers (MCUs).

With the original introduction of the OMAP platform in the late 1990s, TI has continued to become an even more important player in the Open Source embedded system market. TI's OMAP platform delivers a variety of high-performance application processors with fast, portable power and a robust third-party support network with a software portfolio which includes Open Source. TI supports Open Source initiatives to drive innovation and enable its customers to create market-leading devices.

Now in its third generation of OMAP processor families, one of TI's more popular OMAP devices is the OMAP3530, based on a 600-MHz ARM® Cortex™-A8 core. The OMAP3530 processor is used on the Beagle Board, an ultra-low cost, high performance, low power OMAP 3 based platform designed by BeagleBoard.org community members. The Beagle Board has the entire functionality of a PC - including full video and audio capabilities - and is well supported by a number of standard Linux distributions. This support makes it possible to use the Beagle Board as an Open Source self-hosted development system for embedded devices; it's rapid prototyping at its best!

Successful projects emanating from the Beagle Board community, among others, are

• Android
• ARM^® Linux Internet Platform
• Ubuntu on the Beagle Board 

With the development and the release of the Beagle Board, along with its OSADL membership, TI is underlining its commitment to Open Source software and is presenting itself as a partner of the community.

But apparently there is much more to come from TI. On October 21, 2009, the company announced the Sitara™ platform of ARM microprocessors that will run at up to 1 GHz. The first new devices from the Sitara™ family, the AM3505 and the AM3517, already deliver 1,000 Dhrystone MIPS at sub 1 watt power consumption.

Welcome, Texas Instruments! We will do our best to make your membership as successful as possible for all of us.

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