VPX
By: dl

Over the past several months, the VPX Marketing Alliance has been conducting a survey of companies “developing or planning to develop products utilizing embedded computing systems” and it will continue to do so until the end of July. A 30-minute webinar has been scheduled by the alliance for August 17 to present the results of what it calls its “ground breaking” survey.

www.vita.com/vpx.html

VPX
By: dl

OpenVPX is a done deal: that is, ANSI has ratified VITA 65.0-2010 after “several months of fast-tracking” by the VME/VPX community. The key to gaining swift ANSI approval, according to VITA, was “completing the criteria for a successful ballot.”

OpenVPX provides an architectural framework for VPX, something which potential users demanded for the sake of interoperability. Said Ray Alderman,
executive director of VITA. “Major industry buyers came to us to get an architectural framework for VPX in place, and quickly. The team responded start to finish in less than 14 months, which is quite incredible given the scope of the
project.”

As a system-level spec, OpenVPX  ”streamlines the use of VPX,” said Neil Peterson, Chairman of the VPX Marketing Alliance. According to VITA,  it is “gaining design wins in many data-intensive applications where performance in throughput and
high-compute density (size) are critical factors.” The coming year should see deployments, VITA said,  in signal and video processing applications, radar, communications, transportation and control and management. 

www.vita.com

COM, SMALL FORM FACTORS
By: dl

Ibase has emerged as the eighth vendor to support the nanoETXexpress COM specification developed by Kontron. “We support the nanoETXexpress form factor because it perfectly meets our customers’ demands for ever smaller and more energy-efficient COTS components for ultra low power carrier board designs,” said Steven Lin, Senior Product Manager at the company.

Lin noted that since the connector on a 84- x 55-mm nanoETXexpress board is pin and signal compatible with the PICMG COM Express Type 1 connector, “NanoETXexpress integrates seamlessly into our existing COM Express portfolio, which is now growing in the low-power, small-form-factor segment with this form factor.” NanoETXexpress COM boards are about 39% the size of COM Express boards.

The other NanoETXexpress supporters besides Kontron and iBase are AAeon Technology, Adlink Technology, Advantech, Ampro, EEPD and Toradex. Kontron has initiated a movement to incorporate nanoETXexpress, along with the 95- x 95-mm microETXexpress, into the COM Express specification. 

 us.kontron.com/about-kontron/news-events/kontron+welcomes+the+8th+vendor+ibase+to+support+the+credit+cardsized+nanoetxexpress+computeronmodules+form+factor.3823.html

by: dl

A consortium of eight embedded computing companies calling themselves the FeaturePak Initiative took the wraps off a new specification, FeaturePak, at the Embedded World conference in Nuremberg, Germany, last week. This I/O expansion spec consists of a very small board (pegged at 3/5 the size of a credit card) and a very minimalist interface with lots of user-definable I/O lines.

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.

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

VPX
By: dl

Perhaps it’s a tribute to the power of an ad hoc group to get things done that the specification crafted by the OpenVPX Industry Working Group has sailed so quickly through the VITA standardization process. At the January VSO meeting, VITA 65 officially became a done deal, less than four months after the working group passed the spec over to VITA.

All the outstanding comments from a previous balloting process have now been declared resolved, and the most recent balloting (the last) turned up the required number of approvals. Now that it’s been ratified by VITA, the next step for VITA 65 OpenVPX is submission to ANSI for standardization.

“Special acknowledgement should be made,” says VITA, “to Curtiss-Wright Controls Embedded Computing’s Pete Jha, chairperson of the VITA 65 working group and Mercury Computer Systems’ Greg Rocco, lead editor of the VITA 65 working group, for their tireless contribution to the timely ratification process and congratulations to the rest of the working group members.”

As for the coming ANSI process, VITA expects that to take no more than three months,  “after which time the specification will be available to designers in the industry.”

www.vita.com/news/VITA-NR-2010-02%20OpenVPX%20Reaches%20VSO%20Ratification.pdf

COMPACT PCI
By: dl

MEN Mikro Inc. has announced its support for PICMG 2.30, a mid-life kicker for the 14-year-old CompactPCI bus which adds PCI Express, Ethernet, SATA, SAS and USB extensions. Adopted by PICMG as the CompactPCI PlusIO specification last December, the spec “defines the use of previously reserved rear I/O pins for the 64-bit CompactPCI system slot with new high-speed serial signals to preserve interoperability with existing CompactPCI standards,” said Manfred Schmitz, MEN’s technical director and chair of the PICMG 2.30 working group. .

“Developments such as the PICMG 2.30 specification enable the large community of existing CompactPCI users to retain their initial investments, while upgrading their systems to perform in accordance with evolving market needs,” said Schmitz, “CompactPCI is a very cost-effective technology that provides exceptional functionality, especially with the incorporation of serial busses.”

The company already has two PICMG 2.30-compliant 3U boards available: a Core 2 Duo SBC and a “transition” module with two Gbit Ethernet, four USB 2.0 and four SATA ports, plus four x1 PCI Express interfaces on board. 

www.men.de/products/search.html

By: dl

Mark March 2 off on your calendar as the day Diamond Systems and an anonymous group of other companies will take the wraps off a new mezzanine board specification at the Embedded World 2010 conference in Nuremberg, Germany. The spec, says Diamond, is “highly synergistic with existing and emerging bus-, I/O-, chip- and board-level technologies…leverages the latest high-speed serial expansion standards and is suitable for use with both x86 and RISC architecture host processors.” Diamond plans to transfer ownership of the spec, which will be “usable by anyone without charge,” to a “suitable” standards organization.

According to Diamond, several companies will demonstrate compatible products at the Nuremberg conference, including I/O expansion modules and baseboards. What’s been revealed so far about the spec is that it’s very low profile and has a compact form factor—said to be three-fifths the size of a credit card and one-third the size of a PC/104 board. Further, it is form-factor and processor agnostic; provides up to 100 I/O points per module; incorporates such industry standards as PCI Express, USB, and I2C; and coexists with PC/104, SUMIT, Qseven, ETX, XTX, COM Express and other popular specifications.

“I expect this new embedded I/O expansion standard to be adopted rapidly throughout the board-level embedded market, because it fills a need that cannot be addressed by stackable expansion standards such as the numerous PC/104, SUMIT, and ITX form-factor variants,” said Rick Lehrbaum, Strategic Development Specialist at Diamond. “Yet, it is synergistic — not competitive — with those standards, as well as with various Computer-on-Module approaches such as COM Express and Qseven.” 

www.diamondsystems.com/news/pdfs/Diamond_Systems_Media_Advisory-01feb10b.pdf

VPX
By: lw

The VPX Marketing Alliance has expanded to 23 members since its founding in December, now spanning small vertical SBC specialists up to large international players such as GE Intelligent Platforms and Themis Computer. A full list of members is available at www.vita.com/VPX. The alliance was formed to promote VPX, Open VPX, VPX REDI, and related standards in the open bus architecture world.

The alliance has launched an online product directory, covering more than 150 products from members.

www.vita.com/news/VITA-NR-2010-01%20VPX%20Marketing%20Alliance%20-%20Members.pdf

COM, SMALL FORM FACTORS
By: dl

VIA Technologies, Inc., originator of the Pico-ITX motherboard form factor, has bowed a new form factor called Mobile-ITX for ultra-compact and portable embedded devices. At 6 x 6 cm, it is just about half the size of Pico-ITX but claims a “rich” set of I/O including “USB, CRT, TTL LCD, PCI Express, SPI, LPC, Video capture (or COM), SDIO, IDE, PS/2, SMB, GPIO, Audio, DVI [and] LVDS (by transmitter).” Click here to see a detailed white paper on Mobile-ITX . The company expects to announce its first Mobile-ITX COM module in Q1 2010.

www.via.com.tw/en/resources/pressroom/pressrelease.jsp?press_release_no=4287