Picture an embedded engineer staring at a bill of materials and realizing the system-on-module and its carrier board cost more than the rest of the design put together. That squeeze is exactly what Forlinx Embedded set out to remove with its new AM62L32 Local EVM.
One board instead of two
Rather than the usual SoM-plus-carrier stack, Forlinx put everything onto a single four-layer PCB built around Texas Instruments' AM62L32 system-on-chip. The result is an industrial-grade evaluation board aimed at factory control, IoT gateways, edge computing, and embedded HMI panels, and it is production-ready enough to prototype on right away. CNX Software spotted the board first, and the spec sheet reads like a checklist of everything a bench engineer keeps asking a dev board for.
What's under the hood
The AM62L32 pairs two Arm Cortex-A53 cores clocked up to 1.25GHz with a single Cortex-M4F for real-time work, so one chip runs your Linux stack and a deterministic control loop side by side. Forlinx backs it with 512MB of LPDDR4 RAM, 8GB of eMMC storage, and a microSD slot for when that fills up. A dedicated octal-SPI interface is on hand if you need to bolt on more flash later.
The I/O list is where anyone studying embedded design should slow down. There are four SPI and five I2C buses, three CAN FD buses, an RS485 line, eight UARTs, two gigabit Ethernet ports, and both USB 2.0 Type-A and USB-C OTG. A second USB-C port breaks out a UART serial debug interface, which saves you soldering flying leads to test points. A four-lane MIPI DSI output drives 1080p60 displays, while an RGB666 LCD interface (tested at 1024x600) shares pins with the GPIO header, a wiring gotcha worth checking before you map your own peripherals.
Why it belongs on your bench
For an ECE thesis team or a school robotics club, a board like this teaches real embedded trade-offs: how a dedicated M4F core handles timing a Linux kernel cannot guarantee, why bus count decides how many sensors and motor drivers you can hang off one controller, and how dropping the carrier board changes the cost. Forlinx has not posted pricing yet and is taking sample requests through its product page. Read the full breakdown at the Hackster writeup, then decide which of those five I2C buses you would wire your first sensor to.
Originally published on blog.circuit.rocks.
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