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cPCI Pentium board integrates more functions

Edited by the Electronicstalk editorial team Mar 14, 2002

The integration density of CompactPCI boards has been increased by a single-height CPU board that features two Fast Ethernet channels, a host of standard PC interfaces and up to 512Mbyte SDRAM.

The integration density of CompactPCI boards has been further increased by PEP Modular Computers with the CP303, a single-height high performance CPU board that features two Fast Ethernet channels, a host of standard PC interfaces and up to 512Mbyte SDRAM.

The heart of this new CPU is the latest Intel Mobile Pentium III-M processor that is clocked from 800MHz to 1.2GHz, supports synchronous DRAM at 133MHz and has separate controllers for network, graphic and storage transfers, making it a major advance in high-end industrial PC integration.

The CP303 combines outstanding performance with versatility of operation and is capable of the highest demands of computer-intensive applications in industrial automation, image processing, military, avionics, telecommunications, Internet, transportation and medical applications.

Using innovative technology for the highest levels of integration this robust design is ideally suited for harsh and rugged industrial environments including options for -40 to +85C extended temperature operation.

The Intel Mobile Pentium III-M in the Micro-FCBGA case features a number of very important advantages for industrial applications.

It has a full speed internal L2 cache of 512Kbyte that is twice as large as existing products and has a lower power consumption due to an even lower core voltage of only 1.15V.

In addition the passively cooled processor can be stressed to a maximum chip surface temperature of +100C.

The 800MHz version dissipates a maximum of only 15W.

Two 10/100Base-TX Ethernet controllers, one inside the 82801 ICH2 and an 82559 chip offer state-of-the-art network connection with adapter fault tolerance not currently available on other 3U CPUs.

There is an EIDE controller with dual Ultra ATA\100 for up to four independent type II drives, a 144-pin socket for CompactFlash up to 512Mbyte or HDD-Microdrive up to 1Gbyte, dual USB and front connection of either COM1 or VGA.

A rear I/O version offers all front interfaces being available on the J2 connector while an 8HP variant allows onboard mounting of a 2.5in HDD.

Supplied as standard is the 815-BO integrated multimedia graphics accelerator with dynamic memory video technology.

As a double slot board, an external high performance Cougar 3DR graphics controller is interfaced via AGP 4x with up to 32Mbyte DDR SDRAM.

Optimised for MPEG2 and MPEG4 video encoding it offers three to four times more CPU relief than currently existing solutions.

An 8HP Multimedia version is available with LVDS, DV1, FireWire, TV out (NTSC-Pal composite video/S video) and audio I/O.

There is intelligent hardware monitoring in the form of onboard temperature and voltage supervision and for applications where safety is critical a battery-buffered real-time clock and a software programmable watchdog are provided.

The CP303 supports most off-the-shelf operating systems including Windows NT/NTE, VxWorks, QNX and Linux.