Paper or plastic? Fries or chips? The options are sometimes overwhelming, as they might also seem to be with this single-slot SBC from North Atlantic Industries that offers plug-in modules for the processor subsystem as well as various I/O options. But when all stacked up with four modules, this PowerPC or Blackfin 64EP3 SBC replaces multiple boards with just one. I/O options include typical defense and automotive analog and digital sensor types, as well as communications schemes like MIL-STD-1553 and GbE. Interestingly, the board comes with a dedicated FPGA and function libraries designed to do pre- and post-data processing, depending upon the I/O subsystem.
The CPU can be either an ADI Blackfin 500 MHz BF-533 DSP processor with Visual DSP++ 4.5 libraries and emulator, or a Freescale MPC8536 PowerQUICC III running at 1.25 GHz. Each CPU subsystem is equipped with flash, an FPGA, and direct I/O to front panel or rear panel I/O when ordered as a conduction-cooled LRU. The PowerPC has DDR2, while the DSP has SRAM. These CPU modules then order around the many I/O choices, which include ARINC 429/575, RS-232/422/485, or CANbus. There’s also myriad other less sexy, though no less important, I/O: A/D, D/A, discrete/TTL/CMOS/differential; RTD, synchro/resolver, LVDT/RVDT, or an encoder. With four mix-and-match slots, the 64EP3 offers lots o’ I/O in not a lot of space.