CompactPCI SBCs Handle Extreme Environments December 07, 2007
Available in commercial, rugged, and military levels of ruggedization, and both air and conduction-cooled versions, the C900 Series 3U CompactPCI single-board computers are well-suited for extreme environmental applications. Using two thermal sensors positioned at critical locations, the board self-monitors temperature and controls power dissipation. The SBC is designed around the Marvell MV64460 Discovery III system controller, which integrates both a memory controller and a dual PCI/PCI-X Bridge operating at up to 133 MHz. This allows the SBCs to perform either as the cPCI system controller or as a peripheral board. When configured as a system controller, the C900 Series can support up to six additional cards on the cPCI backplane, proving clock, arbitration, and interrupt capabilities. The SBCs offers six standard variants of I/O capabilities including multiple choices of two Gigabit Ethernet ports, two high-speed serial communications ports, two USB 2.0 ports, and up to eight general purpose discrete I/O channels (eight single-ended or four RS-422 differential channels). The boards also have a PMC slot for additional modules and functionality, further increasing the board’s capabilities. They incorporate the low-power version of the Freescale MPC7447A PowerPC microprocessor with a large integrated on-chip L1 and L2 cache. The devices operate at 1.167 GHz. In addition, AltiVec support allows the user to take advantage of the processor’s real-time vector processing capabilities. Memory capacity includes up to 1 Gbyte of fast DDR SDRAM with error-check-and-correction protection, 64 Mbytes user flash, 32 Mbytes boot flash, up to 1 Gbyte of flash file (NAND Flash), and 128 kbytes NVRAM for user/application specific parameter storage. DIAMOND POINT INTERNATIONAL (EUROPE) LTD., Rochester, Kent, U.K. +44 01634 300900.
