Having mastered shipping, Amazon has begun chipping

27 January 2016 News

A new player has entered the global semiconductor fray, in the form of no other than Amazon.com. After having purchased Annapurna Labs last year in preparation for this gambit, the online retailer has launched the Alpine platform-on-chip and subsystems product line.

Initially targeting OEMs in the niche markets of home gateways, Wi-Fi routers and Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices, the product portfolio leverages the 32-bit ARMv7 and 64-bit ARMv8 architectures. With up to four cores, the devices are optimised for general-purpose computing, with advanced storage interfaces, PCIe Gen3 and multimode Ethernet connectivity of up to 10G.

Annapurna maintains Alpine support in the Linux and FreeBSD open source projects. These standard open source operating systems allow third parties to easily run their applications and drivers on the Alpine platform and quickly qualify updated software on Alpine-based products. Multiple third party applications for the home segment run on the Alpine platform, including video streaming, security and cloud connectivity.

The Alpine platform works with a variety of standard open source libraries and development models including Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK), OpenWRT, and open source hypervisor and container frameworks. In addition, Annapurna offers a hardware development kit for Alpine-based designs, which includes schematics files, layout files, thermal guidelines and a bill of materials.

For more information visit www.annapurnalabs.com

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