Arcom announces the world’s first PC/104 based Intel® XScale embedded processor board

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Jenny McCrae writes “Kansas City, USA and Cambridge, England – July, 2003. Arcom is pleased to announce the world’s first ultra-low power PC/104 form factor embedded processor board based on an Intel XScale RISC processor. The VIPER board is a PC/104 (3.6″ x 3.8″) single board computer using the 400MHz Intel PXA255 XScale application processor (ARM v.5TE compliant) and is designed to offer a low power, off-the-shelf solution for industrial control, instrumentation and display system applications.”

The VIPER has a typical power consumption of just 1.4W from a single 5v input and includes power management control to achieve less than 200mW in standby mode – ideal for sealed fan-less enclosures and battery backed systems. It is supported by a ready-to-run application Development Kit using RedBoot, a fast and efficient network aware boot loader for installing operating systems and applications directly into the on board Flash memory. The Development Kit includes the 400MHz VIPER board fitted with 64Mbytes of DRAM and 16Mbytes of Flash, VIPER ICE (Industrial Compact Enclosure), the VIPER-UPS (uninterruptible power supply), an optional Q-VGA color display and touchscreen and a comprehensive Quickstart manual.

The VIPER includes an incredible range of on board peripherals including a flat panel display controller for TFT and STN displays, 10/100baseTx Ethernet, 5 serial ports (including 2 serial ports with 128byte FIFOs), I/O expansion using the PC/104 bus, CompactFlash socket for hot swap memory and wireless cards. The board has been partitioned to take full advantage of the power management features of the ARM based PXA255 processor and to achieve the very best performance for power sensitive applications.

The standard VIPER board is specified for operation from -20°C to +70°C. The board has been designed using components with extended temperature range specifications and is available with a -40°C to +85°C operating temperature specification. The combination of features and temperature specification gives you a highly versatile, extremely low power embedded controller suited to commercial, industrial, military and mobile telematics applications.

The XScale core is the building block for Intel’s Personal Internet Client Architecture and offers a high performance, ultra-low power platform fully compliant with the ARM v.5TE instruction set. These RISC processors extend the technology roadmap for Intel’s StrongARM processor (now end-of-life), by offering increased clock speeds and reduced power consumption. The PXA255 packs a wide range of integrated peripherals such as a memory/CompactFlash controller with a 200MHz internal bus, color TFT/STN LCD controller, power management, RTC, interrupt/DMA controllers as well as a multitude of serial ports including support for Bluetooth and IrDA. The PXA255 is well suited for a wide range of low power applications using the leading embedded operating systems such as embedded Linux, Windows CE, VxWorks and QNX Neutrino.

Intel and XScale are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation. ARM and StrongARM are trademarks of ARM Ltd. RedBoot is a trademark of Red Hat Inc.

About Arcom (www.arcom.com)
Arcom, a Spectris company (LSE: SXS.L), is a leading supplier of embedded computer and communications technology to industry. Founded in 1982, Arcom has developed a broad range of standard embedded hardware and software solutions for control, data acquisition and data delivery systems. From its design centers in Kansas City and Cambridge England, Arcom is also able to offer Design Services to meet the needs of high volume OEM and specialized customer requirements.

Marketing contact for Arcom:
Jenny McCrae
Tel: +44 (0) 1223 403421
jmccrae@arcom.com”

Link: arcom.com