Advantech to Support Qseven COM

Advantech joins Taiwanese industrial PC manufacturer IEI Technology Corp. in supporting the Qseven computer-on-module (COM) form factor. The Qseven form factor specifies a 70mm x 70mm COM and only provides support for the latest serial interfaces. No legacy interfaces (e.g. ISA) are supported. According to the Qseven presentation, the new form factor is neccessary to enable COM to support the latest 45 nm chipsets and the latest graphics interfaces.

According to Electronicstalk:

Advantech has joined the ranks of supporters of the new Qseven computer-on-module (COM) standard This brings the total number of companies that actively support the new Qseven COM standard to a total of 11

Qseven, initiated by Congatec and Seco, is the first COM standard that is specifically designed for mobile applications requiring the latest low-power processor technologies within a small footprint.

With a maximum power consumption of 12W specified in the standard, the new form factor is expected to appeal to manufacturers of applications that require battery operation.

"We are faced with a rapidly growing market for ultra mobile applications", says Jeff Chen, CTO of Advantech.

"Qseven is perfectly streamlined to this emerging market".

"I'm confident that Qseven will establish itself as the global industry standard of the future".

"Due to the strong support from the embedded community Qseven is already a de facto industry standard today".

"Qseven enables new applications in mobile and battery powered systems, which current solutions do not support adequately".

"This will open exciting new markets", says Gerhard Edi, CEO of Congatec

The proliferation of new form factors in the embedded computing industry is exciting and enables system develops to create better systems and applications. The Qseven standard will certainly enable baseboard designers to develop small baseboards for specific applications in mobile devices.

Presentation: Small Form Factor for Ultra Mobile Applications
Electronics Talk: Computer-on-module standard gathers support

28 PCI Express (PCIe) lanes on a single board

My company, IEI Technology Corp., is in the process of releasing two standard single board computers (SBC) in different form factors that each have access to 28 PCI Express (PCIe) lanes. (OK I'm punting my company's product but they do pay my salary and, if sales are good, give us bonuses!).

In industrial computing, expansion is critical. Having many expansion options enables a single system to be connected to large number of expansion cards or devices enabling the system to manage more applications or carry out more tasks.

However, most SBC (and specifically PICMG 1.3 form factor CPU cards) typically provide a maximum of 20 PICe lanes. Applications that required more than 20 PCIe lanes would typically use server grade motherboards. However, even though these applications require significant expansion, they do not neccessarily require the processing power of a server processor. Therefore developing solutions for these applications are expensive and wasteful of resources.

Recognizing this as an oppotunity, IEI has released two SBC with 28 PCIe lanes. The first was a PICMG 1.3 CPU card, the SPCIE-3600AM2, and the second was an ATX motherboard, the IMBA-3600AM2. These boards are especially apt for machine vision applications where large data streams are transmitted to and from the cameras.

Both SBC come with a NVIDIA MCP55Pro (NFP-3600) system chipset, support AMD Socket AM2 Opteron, Athlon 64, Athlon 64 X2 and Sempron processors and 1.0 GB DDR2 memory modules.

Anyway, I thought these products were pretty cool and thought I would share. Let me know what you think.

Introduction to PICMG 1.3 : The new PICMG 1.3 specification (PDF link)
ATX Form Factor: ATX
Introduction to PCIe: An Overview of the PCI Express Standard