Congatec adds XA945 module to range

The low-power and attractively priced module features four PCI Express links instead of an ISA bus.

The module is equipped with the Intel Atom Processor N270 and a fully featured Mobile Intel 945GME Express chipset including the Intel I/O Controller Hub 7-M.

The 95 x 114mm XTX module is designed to deliver a good performance-per-watt ratio at an attractive price level.

The total thermal design power (TDP) of the processor/chipset combination is only 8W.

As a result of enhanced power management functions, modern applications typically require considerably less than 5W.

In conjunction with ACPI 3.0 battery management, such low-power requirements enable designers to create mobile embedded applications with a full set of interfaces.

The Conga-XA945 supports four PCI Express links, six USB 2.0 ports, two serial ATA interfaces, an IDE interface as well as Intel High Definition Audio.

In addition, it comes with a 32-Bit PCI bus, 10/100 BaseT Ethernet, multi master IC bus, LPC bus and fan control.

A DDR2 SODIMM socket enables flexible memory configuration up to a size of 2GByte.

The Conga-XA945 is powered by the 45nm Intel Atom processor N270 that is equipped with 512 KByte L2 cache.

The processor operates at 1.6GHz clock speed and utilises a 533MHz front side bus.

Thanks to Intel Speedstep Technology, this robust CPU will rarely reach its maximum power consumption of 2.5W when used in real-life applications, the company said.

The Intel Atom processor N270 also supports hyper-threading in order to allow for virtualisation.

The Conga-XA945 can therefore act like a dual-core system and independently operate two operating systems simultaneously.

The Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950, which is integrated in the Mobile Intel 945GSE Express chipset, allows more than 10 GB/s bandwidth for a maximum of 224MByte video memory allocation.

This enables designers to implement power-efficient 32-bit 3D graphics.

Both independent graphic pipelines can use dual-channel (2 x 24-Bit) LVDS, the two SDVO interfaces or the analogue VGA.

In addition, the Conga-XA945 implements the Embedded Panel Interface (EPI) and the VESA DisplayID standard allowing for automatic recognition of the attached flat panel display.

All Congatec modules are equipped with an embedded BIOS and a board controller that enhance embedded features such as system monitoring, watchdog timer and the IC bus.

With the ability to isolate itself from the main x86 processor, these features are also made available in stand-by mode, hence promoting further power saving functionality.

In addition to enhanced power management, the Congatec embedded BIOS also supports ACPI 3.0 battery management.