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