Minimalist I/O scheme struts its stuff

SPEC WATCH
By: dl

FeaturePak: Fast links & 100 I/O points in a 4.335-inch-square envelope

Basically, the FeaturePak interface is power, ground, one or two x1 PCI Express links, one or two USB 2.0 ports, a serial port, a nice chunk of reserved lines, a few management and utility lines, and up to 100 user-definable I/O lines, some of them electrically isolated. The form factor is 2.55 x 1.70-inches, just under 4.5 square inches, which is small indeed even in the small-board world. The form factor of the popular PC/104, in comparison, comes in at 13.4 inches.

FeaturePak Interface Details

Fathered by Diamond Systems, the spec is now supported by seven other companies, most of them European. “Following the FeaturePak Initiative’s initial launch,” said Diamond founder and president Jonathan Miller, “we intend to turn the FeaturePak specification, trademark, and logo over to a suitable standards organization so it can become an industry-wide, open-architecture, embedded standard.”

The charter members of the FeaturePak Initiative, besides Diamond, are Arbor Technology, Cogent Computer Systems, congatec,  Connect Tech, Douglas Electronics, Hectronic AB, and IXXAT Automation.

The membership includes three companies who are also members of the Qseven consortium. That consortium took a COM standard developed by congatec in 2007 and rallied around it as a group in 2008. The Qseven form factor is also very small at 2.8 x 2.8 inches and about 7.8 square inches. Today, about two dozen embedded computing companies support the Qseven spec, with eight of them selling ten different Qseven boards, and ten of them offering Qseven carriers.

FeaturePak uses the same basic fast (2.5 GHz), high density (0.5 mm pitch), connector as Qseven: the 230-pin MXM from Foxconn, Speedtech or Lotes, originally developed for use in notebook computers. The MXM is a novel, swiveling low-profile connector: a FeaturePak board sits only 2.7 mm or 5 mm above a baseboard.

At last week’s conference, Diamond introduced its maiden FeaturePak products: a carrier and a DAC board the company says integrates its “newest and fastest analog I/O technology.” Connect Tech, in turn, demo’d a serial I/O module for FeaturePak and a PCI Express to FeaturePak adapter.

Why no LPC (Low Pin-Count) bus in FeaturePak’s interface mix, a bus that’s common to other contemporary  mix and match interface architecture schemes such as Qseven, SUMIT and COMIT?

The FeaturePak Initiative explains: “It was decided that 2 PCI Express x1 lanes, 2 USB 2.0 channels, SMBus, and a serial port were sufficient to cover the full range of current requirements, particularly in light of LPC being an Intel-specific bus that targets a diminishing number of legacy ISA peripherals. This decision allowed us to reserve more connector pins for future purposes, thereby helping to ensure that the FeaturePak specification will be able to adapt to evolving host interface requirements.” 

“FeaturePak” may seem a strange name to give a minimalist interface architecture that packs no bells and whistles whatsoever, but that’s irrelevant to whether it will succeed in the marketplace or fail. Perhaps the times are ripe for a modular expansion scheme offering very fine-grained I/O functionality, for small boards and simple interfaces that slip neatly into baseboards across a range of different architectures. Perhaps not.

www.diamondsystems.com/files/binaries/featurepak-launch-pr.pdf