XTX closes the gap between ETX and COM Express

Congatec reckons that even well established standards have a high potential for improvement, and is adopting the XTX standard as the natural successor to ETX.

Congatec reckons that even well established standards have a high potential for improvement.

The recently announced XTX standard is based on ETX Rev 2.7 but replaces the old fashioned ISAbus with latest I/O technologies like PCI Express, SATA and USB 2.0.

With the XTX standard it's possible to vastly improve I/O performance, which is often the biggest bottleneck for fast processors.

XTX enhances the PCIbus by offering four PCI Express Lanes.

This enhancement alone offers data throughput that is more than 10 times the speed of a single 32bit PCIbus.

The 32bit PCIbus is still included for controlling slower peripherals.

A 400kHz I2C bus is incorporated for easy connection of sensors, transmitters and serial data storage.

The LPC bus, a serialised bus that is fully software compatible with ISA, has also been added to the XTX specification.

Fast mass storage devices can be connected using four serial ATA interfaces.

Parallel ATA is still available to support cost efficient and rugged CompactFlash devices.

XTX supports up to two ExpressCard slots - the successor to PCMCIA.

This interface allows the use of USB 2.0 and PCI Express applications as well.

The ExpressCard standard offers a new performance class in a small package.

Next to the standard audio support (line-in, line-out, mic), XTX offers a digital audio interface for AC97 or high definition audio codecs (HDA) that can be implemented on the baseboard.

This feature can be applied to IP telephony or even high fidelity audio with many channels.

The power management improvements offered by the XTX standard enable monitoring and speed control of fans and also allow detailed system monitoring even when the system is switched to standby mode.

With XTX most existing ETX designs can easily be upgraded to new technologies, and for designs that do not use ISA, XTX is 100% backward compatible with ETX.

There are no mechanical changes required when upgrading to XTX.

Congatec will launch the first XTX based products in the second quarter of 2005.

Along with Congatec the XTX standard is already supported by Embedded Logic.

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