News and New Products

Low-power computer offers multiple configurations

By Warren Webb -- EDN, 5/13/2004

Ready to tackle the shock, vibration, and temperature extremes of industrial environments, the new ICP-PM hot-swappable CompactPCI single-board computer from Inova Computers features a low-power, Pentium M microprocessor. The single-slot configuration of the system provides two USB interfaces, two independent Ethernet interfaces, and a VGA port on the front panel. Additional rear-panel I/O includes a floppy interface; an ATA 133 disk-drive interface; two serial ports; VGA graphics; and interfaces to a keyboard, mouse, and beeper. The board also features an intelligent I/O-configuration utility and a backup BIOS (Picture).

The 3U CompactPCI board incorporates a 1.6-GHz Pentium M processor, which can operate at 600 MHz to 1.8 GHz in 200-MHz steps through BIOS selection. The ICP-PM also supports as much as 1.5 Gbytes of 333-MHz DDR-RAM and includes a CompactFlash socket with a standard IDE interface to accommodate either flash memory or the latest MicroDrive units. For transfer-intensive applications, you can configure the ICP-PM for 64-bit CompactPCI, boosting the bus's maximum theoretical transfer rate from 135 Mbyte/sec to 270 Mbytes/sec. An optional piggyback board is available to provide AGP graphics and MPEG-2 hardware decoding. The ICP-PM is fully x86-compatible, supporting Linux, QNX, VxWorks, and Windows operating systems. OEM prices for the 1.6-GHz ICP-PM start at $1500, and delivery times are two to six weeks.

Inova Computers Inc, 1-508-771-4415, www.inova-computers.com.