Five leading embedded single board computer (SBC) manufacturers announced at the electronicaUSA/Embedded Systems Conference held recently, the publication of a new industry standard for small form factor embedded computer boards, called Embedded Platform for Industrial Computing or EPIC.
The EPIC standard provides a platform on which to build the next generation of feature-rich, embedded systems for industrial, medical, military, transportation, and commercial applications. The specification is published as an open standard by Micro/sys, Octagon Systems, VersaLogic, WinSystems and Ampro Computers, all pioneers and innovators in standards-based embedded computing.
Embedded systems manufacturers who require faster CPUs and/or more I/O than found on a PC/104 CPU can now design in a broadly-supported, standardised, full featured platform. This is especially important for applications that cannot accommodate larger EBX-sized boards. Phase one of the EPIC standard supports more than 1000 PC/104 and PC/104-Plus compliant I/O expansion modules. This assures embedded systems designers long-term availability, expansion, and support. Future phases of the EPIC standard will support new bus technologies such as PCI Express while maintaining consistency in footprint and mounting hole placement.
"For years, the embedded single board computer market has suffered from the lack of a published mid-sized motherboard standard," said Eric Gulliksen, market analyst at VDC. "The publication of the EPIC form factor specification and the support commitment by five market leaders brings relief to system manufacturers who need consistency and standardisation in a mid-sized SBC. EPIC could be the biggest development in the industry since the PC/104 Consortium was founded 12 years ago."
The 115 x 165 mm size is optimal for including full PC/104-Plus compliance (ISA and PCI buses) and a rich set of I/O implemented as either pin-headers or PC-style connectors. The standard provides specific I/O zones to implement, for example, multiple Ethernet ports, four or more serial ports, general-purpose I/O, video, and even application-specific I/O such as 802.11x wireless, IEEE 1394 Firewire, and the latest technologies. The area of the EPIC card is almost exactly halfway between the universally accepted PC/104 and EBX standards.
The EPIC standard is designed to reduce the confusion caused by the introduction in the last few years of various mid-sized cards plagued with inconsistent connector and expansion schemes, and with no governing specifications. The specification can be downloaded free-of-charge from www.epic-sbc.org.
Think Diamond Long-life COM-based SBCs Electronic Products Design
Computer/Embedded Technology
A COM-based SBC combines the flexibility of a standard computer-on-module (COM) with a baseboard offering additional I/O, expansion sockets, power supplies, and I/O connectors. The result is a highly flexible, highly expandable, feature-dense product that can be adapted to the widest range of applications, offering maximum product lifetime.
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