Flagship SBC gains rugged options

Edited by the Electronicstalk editorial team Dec 30, 2003

Thales Computers has released two new rugged versions of its flagship PowerEngine7 single board computer.

Thales Computers has released two new rugged versions of its flagship PowerEngine7 single board computer.

The new air-cooled (RA) and conduction-cooled (RC) PowerEngine7 SBCs combine extremely high performance with low power dissipation, making them ideal for data processing applications in the aerospace, military and other harsh-environment industries.

The new rugged versions of the PowerEngine7 feature single or dual PowerPC-750FX processors operating at 700MHz, providing over 1600 Dhrystone 2.1 MIPS, while drawing an extremely low 14W of power for the entire board.

The RA and RC PowerEngine7 SBCs are equipped with up to 512Mbyte SDRAM and up to 128Mbyte of Flash memory.

Performance is enhanced by the Avignon host bridge system controller, which is optimised for use with the PowerPC processor; as well as the ALMA2e VME-PCI bridge, providing the capability for 2eSST transfers.

The high performance, rugged PowerEngine7 SBCs are also fully equipped for demanding I/O requirements, with twin PMC slots (one PCI 64 at 66MHz, one PCI 32 at 33MHz), two Ethernet interfaces - 10/100/1000 and 10/100Base-T - as well as up to six serial lines.

An available PMC carrier, the V2PMC (also available in rugged versions), can be used to expand the PCI 64bit bus on the P0 connector, providing up to four PMC slots.

The air-cooled RA version of PowerEngine7 has an operating temperature range of -40 to +75C and a storage temperature range of -45 to +100C, whereas the operating temperature range of the conduction-cooled RC version is -40 to +85C and the storage temperature range is -45 to +100C.

Both new versions of the PowerEngine7 are available with support for widely used VME operating systems, including VxWorks for Tornado 2.2 and 2.0.2, LynxOS 4, and the Linux 2.4 kernel.

The new rugged RA and RC PowerEngine7 SBCs are available immediately.

Pricing for a PowerEngine7 starts at $6072 (100-off).