Evolution of an Icon The new ATHENA III SBC with Intel Atom E640T 1.0GHz processor and on-board Data Acquisition Athena Athena II Athena III CPU + DAQ Athena III is the newest incarnation of our Athena III features: highly popular Athena embedded SBC family, o 1.0GHz Intel Atom E640T CPU oering the latest generation of computing o 1GB memory soldered on board and I/O technologies. It provides CPU and data o 1.6GHz CPU / 2GB memory available acquisition integrated onto a single board, o providing rugged performance in a highly 4 serial, 4 USB, 1 Gigabit Ethernet, 1 SATA compact form factor with PC/104 expansion. o LVDS and VGA support o 24 digital I/O Athena III¹s backwards compatibility enables o 16 channel 16-bit A/D, 150KHz longer product lifecycles and simplies o 4 channel 12-bit D/A technology refresh eorts. It oers upgraded o Autocalibration of A/D and D/A features plus triple the performance while o maintaining equivalent power consumption. PC/104 stackable I/O expansion o -40°C to +85°C operating temperature o Fanless cooling www.diamondsystems.com o Backward compatible with Athena II © 2013, Diamond Systems. Inc., PC/104™ is a trademark of the PC/104 Embedded +1-800-367-2104 Consortium. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. EXCALIBUR SYSTEMS www.smallformfactors.com ON THE COVER: www.pc104online.com The world of digital signage is a small one after all, and semi- conductor companies are taking note. Intel and AMD offer their interpretations on SFFs the digital signage space, and ZigBee member Volume 17 • Number 1 companies talk smart energy for the home in the PC/104 and Small Form Factors 2013 Resource Guide! FEATURES IT'S A SMALL (FORM FACTOR) WORLD COLUMNS Digital signage systems Small matters 7 Power and programming Inside Intel’s Open Pluggable 10 By Brandon Lewis Specification Interview with James Tan, Intel SFF-SIG 8 Where advertising meets connector technology Achieving ultra-compact, 14 By Alexander Lochinger, SFF-SIG President multi-display digital signage systems with high-performance PC/104 Consortium 9 Accelerated Processing Units PC/104 architecture: Solid By Dave Jessel, AMD By Dr. Paul Haris, PC/104 Consortium Board Director Consolidating heterogeneity 16 with OpenCL RESOURCE GUIDE 14 By Brandon Lewis PROFILE INDEX 26 Application Specific 27 THE BIG YET SMALL PICTURE Complete Systems 28 Smart energy COMs and SOMs 29 ZigBee Application 20 I/O Boards 35 Solar Energy Profiles converge to bring Interface and Expansion 37 Smart Energy home Mezzanines and Carriers 38 Q&A with Thomas Barber, Packaging 39 20 Silicon Laboratories, and PC/104 40 Mark Grazier, Texas Instruments SBCs and Boards 46 E-CASTS EVENTS Managing safety and security through open architectures Design & Manufacturing New England March 26, 2013 2:00 PM EDT April 10-11, 2013 Presented by: Esterel, GE Intelligent Platforms, RTI, Wind River Boston Convention & Exhibition Center ecast.opensystemsmedia.com/384 http://DM-NewEngland.com Understanding Concurrency, Performance Optimizations, and Debugging for Multicore Platforms DESIGN West 2013 March 27, 2013 2:00 PM EDT April 23-25, 2013 Presented by: Freescale The San Jose McEnery Convention Center ecast.opensystemsmedia.com/382 http://ubmdesign.com/sanjose/ Published by: PC/104 and Small Form Factors www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=1854269 2013 OpenSystems Media® © 2013 PC/104 and Small Form Factors All registered brands and trademarks used in PC/104 and Small Form Factors are property of their respective owners. @sff_mag ISSN: Print 1096-9764, ISSN Online 1550-0373 4 S Spring 2013 S PC/104 and Small Form Factors Resource Guide ADVERTISER INFORMATION Page Advertiser/Ad title Small Form Factors Editorial/Production Staff 18 ACCES I/O Products, Inc. – Brandon Lewis, Associate Editor Dr. Paul Haris USB embedded I/O solutions – [email protected] PC/104 Consortium Board Director rugged, industrial strength USB Alexander Lochinger Steph Sweet, Creative Director 5 AMD – Fueling innovation for SFF-SIG President [email protected] tomorrow’s technology ... today Sales Group 2 Diamond Systems Corporation – Tom Varcie International Sales Evolution of an Icon – Athena III Senior Account Manager Elvi Lee, Account Manager – Asia SBC [email protected] [email protected] 3 Excalibur Systems, Inc. – Rebecca Barker Gerry Rhoades-Brown Dragon – it’s not a myth Strategic Account Manager Account Manager – Europe [email protected] [email protected] 24-25 RTD Embedded Technologies, Eric Henry, Strategic Account Manager Regional Sales Managers Inc. – PCI Express, PCI, and [email protected] Barbara Quinlan, Southwest ISA experts [email protected] Ann Jesse, Strategic Account Manager 15 Technologic Systems – [email protected] Denis Seger, Southern California [email protected] Industrial controllers and Christine Long Modbus peripherals Vice President, Online Business Sydele Starr, Northern California [email protected] 21 Themis Computer – [email protected] Take your virtual environment Ron Taylor to the edge Reprints and PDFs East Coast/Mid Atlantic [email protected] [email protected] 13 WDL Systems – The power inside tomorrow’s technology OpenSystems Media Editorial/Production Staff 48 WinSystems, Inc. – Atom powered SBCs high-performance, small and fanless Brandon Lewis, Associate Editor Joe Pavlat, Editorial Director 19 X-ES – Rugged, powerful xTCA and CompactPCI Systems xTCA and CompactPCI Systems COM Express PC/104 and Small Form Factors [email protected] [email protected] Jerry Gipper, Editorial Director Reader Resources Warren Webb, Editorial Director VITA Technologies Embedded Computing Design [email protected] Subscribe to 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Avenue of the Fountains, Ste. 201 Twitter: @sff_mag www.opensystemsmedia.com/subscriptions Fountain Hills, AZ 85268 Karen Layman, Business Manager LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/groups/ Tel: 480-967-5581 n Fax: 480-837-6466 30233 Jefferson PC-104-Small-Form-Factors-1854269 St. Clair Shores, MI 48082 6 S Spring 2013 S PC/104 and Small Form Factors Resource Guide www.smallformfactors.com small MATTERS By Brandon Lewis Power and programming New processors, new programming … in the world of technology things move problems Multicore processors – they’ve been pretty fast, often too fast for end users to keep here for some time now, and it appears as though they’re here to stay. So per- track of currently available products that can haps a better question than “what’s after multicore?” is “what comes next help them day in and day out. for multicore?” as a framework for simultaneously pro- particular moment, Grazier stressed Traditionally, multicore processors have gramming multiple processor resources that it will take time for consumers to been a collection of homogeneous CPUs with shared memory has not existed. In become aware of even simple, cost- arranged in either cache-coherent Non- the Digital Signage section of this issue, effective technologies, and that some Uniform Memory Architecture (ccNUMA) Dave Jessel of AMD goes into further entity (in this case the utility provider) or Symmetric Multi-Processor (SMP) detail about heterogeneous processing, must assume the responsibility of groups. Today, however, as designers and Neil Trevett, President of the Khronos spreading the word about useful new are increasingly concerned with saving Group and VP of Mobile Content at products. The point being that in the board real estate while improving the NVIDIA, explains how the OpenCL world of technology things move pretty price/performance ratio of their offer- framework can help ease heteroge- fast, often too fast for end users to keep ings, conventional concepts of the multi- neous programming pains. More infor- track of currently available products that core architecture have begun to change. mation on heterogeneous processing can help them day in and day out. can also be found through the Hetero- The latter was a topic of discussion at geneous System Architecture (HSA) Although the technologies we cover the Real-Time & Embedded Computing