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COM Express modules are rugged performers

Edited by the Electronicstalk editorial team Apr 3, 2007

Family of COM Express modules uniquely addresses a broad range of commercial and truly rugged applications.

Ampro Computers has unveiled a complete family of COM Express modules that uniquely addresses a broad range of commercial and truly rugged applications.

Ampro's COM 830 product offers a choice of Intel Core Duo U2500 at 1.2GHz (dual core CPU) or Celeron M 423 at 1.07GHz (single core CPU) processors.

Ampro's rugged COM 840 module is supporting Intel's next generation Centrino Duo/Core2 Duo platform (code named Santa Rosa) in the first half of 2007, with a choice of Core2 Duo T7500 CPU at 2.2GHz or Core2 Duo L7500 CPU at 1.6GHz, along with 4Mbyte of on-chip L2 cache and powerful 800MHz FSB (front side bus).

Together, these advanced technology pluggable modules enable a brand new class of battery-powered military and industrial portable computers with ACPI power management as well as next-generation imaging, gaming, signage, and streaming media applications that leverage the bandwidth of the PCI Express x16 interface to the baseboard.

"Ampro is fully committed to the PICMG COM Express COM.0 form factor for high-end applications", said Joanne Mumola Williams, President and CEO of Ampro.

"Now that the market has consolidated around the Type 2 pinout and the smaller basic size, COM.0 now joins ETX and XTX as the third mainstream form factor standard for interchangeable mezzanine-based embedded computing".

"Ampro is pleased to bring its leading-edge technology and thermal design expertise to these popular form factors".

At a mere 95 x 125mm, the COM 830 and rugged COM 840 contain all of the PC-compatible subsystems short of I/O connectors themselves.

The I/O and bus signals are passed through high-density surface- mount connectors to a custom carrier board, according to the COM.0 Type 2 pinout.

I/O includes two Serial ATA (SATA) ports, eight USB 2.0 ports, Gigabit Ethernet, a legacy IDE channel and AC97 audio.

Southbridge PCI Express x1 lanes and the Northbridge x16 lane are brought to the baseboard for additional I/O and external graphics controller expansion, respectively.

In addition, the x16 lanes can be configured as two SDVO channels for dual displays.

High performance DDR2 667 RAM is supported with (2) SODIMM sockets, providing up to 4Gbyte total RAM.

Ampro uses AMI BIOS with ACPI 2.0 support, including S3 suspend-to-RAM for fastest resume time with long battery life.

Both products are fully RoHS compliant.

Quick-start kits for these products include a reference design COM Express baseboard with baseboard schematics and bills of material, heatspreader and 1Gbyte DDR RAM installed, plus device drivers and board support packages (BSPs) for Windows XP, Windows XP Embedded, Windows CE and a full Linux 2.6 distribution.

COM 830 samples will be available within 45 days.

Prices start in the US $500s in production quantities.