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All Aboard the Small Form Factor Express
COM Express
Big is beautiful – or so we are told. But now it looks like small and petit is well and truly back in fashion.
SWAP – Size Weight And Power is the driving force behind many embedded applications today and low power, and often small footprint, processors such as those made by UK based ARM and Intel’s ATOM enable designs to shrink to very small proportions.
COM Express was ratified by PICMG in 2005, but now 6 years later the COM Express Mini / Ultra (or Nano ETX Express as Kontron would have us call it) is here and its tiny!
This new form factor is about the size of a credit card, specifically 55mm x 84mm and can have one of 2 connector configurations defined by the COM Express standard; both using a 220 pin connector.
- Type 1: Single connector (220 pin), 6 PCI Express lanes, no PEG, no PCI, no IDE, 4 SATA, 1 LAN
- Type 10: Single connector (220 pin), 4 PCI Express lanes, no PEG, no PCI, no IDE, 2 SATA, 1 LAN, single channel LVDS only, DDI, no VGA, 2 Serial COM
As you can see the focus is high speed PCI Express and Type 1 has 6 PCI Express lanes. But the more popular Type 10 maximises the variety and has a lower 4 PCI Express Lanes but adds Serial COMS, DDI (digital display interface) and LVDS.
A custom carrier board will need to be designed by the OEM to host the COM Express module but this can easily remain in the small footprint allowing the form factor to be used in ultra small, mobile and hand held applications. This enables new application opportunities that were previously inhibited by size, weight or power restrictions.
Applications – robotics, UAV, communications, computing, EPOS, handheld terminals and small rugged computers.
XPand6001 - Extreme Engineering
Sarsen Technology Limited is currently reviewing a range of COM Express modules for the UK market; if you have a project requirement or would like to know more about small form factor boards and chassis please get in touch via the website.
Links/References:
ARM – http://www.arm.com
ATOM – http://www.intel.com/…
Extreme Engineering – http://www.x-es.com
Image Credit – www.kontron.com
DSP Motor Control – Danville Signal Processing
Danville Signal is partnering with Analog Devices to provide high performance motor control solutions that take advantage of ADI’s strong data converter and signal processing portfolio and Danville’s extensive expertise in SHARC DSPs, signal conditioning, vibration instrumentation and product development.
The fourth generation SHARC DSP is particularly well suited for high performance motor control applications. Floating point processing simplifies algorithm development. The architecture of the SHARC is great for very fast, deterministic interrupt processing that is often necessary when managing low latency feedback and servo control.
The latest fourth generation SHARCs, the ADSP-21469 and ADSP-21489 include hardware accelerators for FFT processing. Your motor control system could simultaneously be used for machine monitoring, predictive maintenance or two plane balancing.
Danville’s first product introduction will be a reference design the features ADI’s ADSP-21489, AD7656-1 six channel simultaneous sampling ADCs and AD7401A Isolated signal delta modulators. The reference design will include software examples including support for MathWorks’ MATLAB ®. It also has universal support for industrial communications using HMS’s Anybus ® CompactCom modules.
The reference design uses modular construction. It’s based on the dspblok 21489sp6 DSP+FPGA Module that combines an Analog Devices’ ADSP-21489 SHARC and Xilinx’s Spartan 6 FPGA. We have data converter modules that support the AD7656-1 and other ADI PulSAR ADCs.
You can take Danville’s COTS modules to reduce your design risk and speed up time to market or you can use the reference design as a take off point for your own custom design. We also provide design services that can help you with your motor control application.
Contact Sarsen Technology if you would like to know more about Danville Signal Processing Motor Control and Audio hardware solutions.
More info:
MP32: First Soft Processor Supporting MIPS and VxWorks
MP32 is a royalty-free soft core processor from ALTERA, allowing you to easily increase performance by adding as many MP32 processors as you can fit on your FPGA.
What makes the MP32 processor ideal for your custom embedded applications?
- It’s the first MIPS®-compatible soft processor.
- It runs Wind River’s VxWorks real-time operating system, so you can use familiar tools and middleware.
- It’s optimized for Altera® FPGAs and HardCopy® ASICs, including previous-generation and future devices.
SOURCE: MP32: First Soft Processor Supporting MIPS and VxWorks.
Faster Time to Market
A flexible, applications-class processor, MP32 brings with it the expansive MIPS ecosystem of software and tools. This includes intellectual property (IP) cores for embedded processing, protocols, memory control, and applications including video, digital signal processing, and networking.
You’ll get faster time to market because you can reuse a lot of IP—including your own. You’ll also experience faster system integration because you can use our common FPGA design flow, based on Qsys. The Qsys system integration tool, available in Quartus® II software, automatically generates interconnect logic to connect IP functions and subsystems.
Since you can reuse software you’ve already written for your MIPS processor, you’ll be able take advantage of the code, IP, and expertise your team already has.
