SBC stretches PC/104 to 3.25-inch drive footprint
Dec 1, 2005 — by LinuxDevices Staff — from the LinuxDevices Archive — 9 views
Kontron is readying a new member of its PC/104-expandable “speedMOPS” SBC (single-board-computer) family. The speedMOPSlcdPM, available with three mobile Pentium and Celeron processors, is supported by a Linux BSP (board-support package).
Kontron's speedMOPS SBC form-factor approximately matches the footprint of a 3.25-inch disk drive, and positions the processor outside the PC/104-Plus stack envelope, enabling optimal cooling of high-performance CPUs, according to Kontron.
The speedMOPSlcdPM is available with a choice of three Intel processors:
- Passively cooled, cacheless 800 MHz mobile Celeron
- Passively cooled 1 GHz ULV Celeron M 373
- Actively cooled 1.8 GHz Pentium M 745
The cacheless Intel Mobile Celeron processor is intended to be price-competitive with Via's Eden processor, Kontron said.
The SBC includes Intel's 855GME chipset and ICH4 southbridge, which provide support for up to 1 GB of SODIMM DDR RAM along with an integrated graphics engine with two 24-bit LVDS ports. Input/output ports include 10/100 Ethernet, two USB 2.0, two UDMA-33 EIDE, floppy, printer, keyboard, and mouse interfaces. The SBC implements both PC/104-Plus connectors — representing self-stacking, pin-header versions of the ISA and PCI buses.
New standard in the works?
Kontron says it is negotiating for an extension to the PC/104 specification to accomodate the speedMOPS form-factor for high-performance applications.
At 5.8 x 3.8 inches (22 in.2), the speedMOPSlcdPM form-factor is substantially larger than PC/104-Plus (3.6 x 3.8 inches, 13.7 in.2), but slightly smaller in area than the 4.5 x 6.5-inch (29 in.2) EPIC form-factor, which was recently adopted by the PC/104 Consortium.
Availability
Prototypes of the new speedMOPSlcdPM SBCs will be available soon, according to Kontron, with production quantities scheduled for the first quarter of next year.
In addition to Linux, the new SBCs are also supported with BSPs for Windows XP Embedded, Windows CE, and VxWorks.
Information regarding pricing was not disclosed.
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