Creator is a family of

single-board computer A single-board computer (SBC) is a complete computer built on a single circuit board, with microprocessor(s), memory, input/output (I/O) and other features required of a functional computer. Single-board computers are commonly made as demonstrati ...

s developed by

Imagination Technologies Imagination Technologies Limited is a British semiconductor and software design company owned by Canyon Bridge Capital Partners, a private equity fund based in Beijing that is ultimately owned by the Chinese government. With its global headquar ...

to promote educational research and software development based on the MIPS architecture. The first board in the platform, the Creator Ci20, was released in August 2014. A second development kit called Creator Ci40 was introduced through a Kickstarter campaign in November 2015.

Hardware

Creator Ci20

The Creator Ci20 board is based on an

Ingenic Ingenic Semiconductor is a Chinese fabless semiconductor company based in Beijing, China founded in 2005. They purchased licenses for the MIPS architecture instruction sets in 2009 and design CPU-microarchitectures based on them. They also design ...

JZ4780 mobile-class application processor, which contains a dual-core 1.2 GHz

MIPS32 MIPS (Microprocessor without Interlocked Pipelined Stages) is a family of reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architectures (ISA)Price, Charles (September 1995). ''MIPS IV Instruction Set'' (Revision 3.2), MIPS Technologies, ...

CPU with 32k I&D L1 cache and 512k L2 cache and an IEEE754 Floating Point Unit, coupled with a

PowerVR PowerVR is a division of Imagination Technologies (formerly VideoLogic) that develops hardware and software for 2D and 3D rendering, and for video encoding, decoding, associated image processing and DirectX, OpenGL ES, OpenVG, and OpenCL accelera ...

SGX540 GPU. This processor supports MXU, a 32-bit

SIMD Single instruction, multiple data (SIMD) is a type of parallel processing in Flynn's taxonomy. SIMD can be internal (part of the hardware design) and it can be directly accessible through an instruction set architecture (ISA), but it should ...

extension. In addition, the board provides: * 8 GB of flash and 1 GB of DDR3 SDRAM memory * Video playback up to 1080p * AC97 audio, via 4-pin input/output jack and HDMI connector * Camera interface – ITU645 controller * Connectivity – 10/100Mbit/s Ethernet, 802.11b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.0 * HDMI output up to 2K resolution * 2 x USB – host and OTG * 14-pin EJTAG connector * 2 x UART, GPIO, SPI, I2C, ADC, expansion headers

Creator Ci40

The Creator Ci40 board is based on a cXT200 chip optimized specifically for IoT applications which contains a dual-core, dual-threaded 550 MHz MIPS interAptiv CPU with 32k I&D L1 cache and 512k L2 cache and an IEEE754 Floating Point Unit coupled with an Ensigma C4500 Wi-Fi radio processor. In addition, the board provides: * 512 MB of NAND flash memory and 256 MB DDR3 SDRAM * 1 x micro SD card * 802.11b/g/n/ac 2x2 Wi-Fi, 802.15.4 6LoWPAN dedicated chip, Bluetooth 4.1 (Classic + Smart, respectively) * Dedicated TPM chip * 1 x RJ45 Ethernet port * 1 x 3.5mm input/output jack, 1 x S/PDIF input/output connector * 32 x GPIO, 2 x mikroBUS i/f, 4 x PWM, 1 x SPI, 2 x UART, 2 x I2C, 5 x ADC, expansion headers, 14-pin EJTAG connector, 9 x indicator LEDs (7 x I/O, 1 x MCU), * 1 x micro USB 2.0 OTG

Software

All Creator boards support the Creator IoT Framework, an open source software package based on the LWM2M protocol developed by the Open Mobile Alliance.

References

{{Reflist Computer science education in the United Kingdom Educational hardware Linux-based devices MIPS architecture Single-board computers