Ah, choices. It’s good to have them. Paper or plastic? Fries? Serial RapidIO or PCIe? These are the choices available to designers of extremely rugged systems when specifying the single-slot C110 from Aitech. The 6U SBC is based upon VPX (VITA 46) with OpenVPX (VITA 65) profiles and features a dual-core PowerPC MPC8640D – one of the last from Freescale available with AltiVec. The CPU clocks at 1.25 GHz and has 2 GB of dual-channel DDR2 SDRAM with ECC, 128 MB of flash, and 8 GB of NAND flash for nonvolatile mass storage.
Since this board is all about the VPX fabric, there are four x4 ports that are configurable for either Serial RapidIO or PCIe. Depending upon the OpenVPX profile, the board can “talk” in VME64, 2eSST, or 2eVME, besides the fabric choices. I/O includes four GbE ports, four USB2, two SATA2, 6 asynchronous serial ports, and 8 GPIO. There’s also I2C to provide system-level board management plus rail voltages, temperatures, and other metrics. Finally, add-on flexibility is provided by two PMC/XMC slots and an optional Aitech I/O module. As with all Aitech boards, this one’s available for extreme environments, operating from -55 °C to +85 °C.
