Diamond Systems Altair

Introduction

Altair is a high performance, highly integrated small form factor single board computer in the EmbeddedXpress (EMX) Basic form factor. Altair incorporates a wealth of standard PC-style I/O plus on-board digital I/O. It accepts both EMX and PCIe MiniCard add-on I/O modules.

The SBC supports either 1GB or 2GB of DDR2 DRAM soldered on-board and provides high-resolution LVDS and VGA graphics interfaces. Additional I/O ports include SATA, USB, serial, CAN, digital I/O, and Gigabit Ethernet. Flexible system expansion is based on stackable EMX modules, and a PCIe MiniCard socket. A socket is also provided for an optional on-board USB flashdisk of up to 8GB.

Altair's power-efficient design leverages Intel's ultra-low-power (Queensbay) silicon platform, consisting of the Atom E680T (Tunnel Creek) processor and EG20T chipset (Topcliff). These ICs are positioned on the bottom of the board, resulting in easy and efficient heat removal via a heatspreader for wide temperature, fanless operation. Altair utilizes conduction cooling for improved ruggedness and reliability through the use of a heatspreader mounted on its bottom side, resulting in optimal thermal management and increased space for I/O functions and connectors. The four mounting holes on the bottom of the conduction cooled heatspreader are #6-32 threaded holes on 2.8" centers.

The SBC's Intel Atom E-Series CPU offers an excellent balance of performance, power consumption, and cost, making Altair an ideal choice for a wide variety of high-performance embedded computing applications. Altair is also virtualization ready, enabled by physical address extension (PAE).

Altair was designed to meet the needs of real-world applications. The SBC integrates an optimal selection of features for its size, power, and cost budgets, yielding maximum functionality and performance within a compact board. Latest generation connectivity such as SATA, Gigabit Ethernet, and PCI Express ensures long lifetime and top performance. EMX and PCIe MiniCard expandability provides access to current and future high-speed I/O.

Software Support

Altair runs Linux, Windows Embedded Standard 7, and Windows Embedded CE. All OS drivers are shipped with the product.

EMX Industry Standard

EmbeddedXpress (EMX) is a new industry standard form factor for embedded computers that combines COM Express CPU modules with stackable I/O expansion.

Benefits of EMX:

• An EMX baseboard is the same size and style as a typical embedded computer board, so it eliminates the need to design a custom baseboard for many applications. A customer can select the COM module that best suits their needs, and match it to the baseboard of choice to get an instant off-the-shelf solution with no custom design.
• Customers enjoy longer product lifetimes, wider choice of processors, better protection from CPU obsolescence, performance scalability, and earlier access to new CPU technology.
• An EMX SBC can fit more processor and I/O circuitry on the board without resorting to shortcuts or form factor extensions. Customers can be assured of standard size and shape boards that will fit into their systems without worrying about non-standard board shapes and sizes.
• The size of EMX Compact is similar to PC/104, providing sufficient room for popular I/O circuits.
• The expansion connector is optimized for size, cost, interconnectivity, PCB area, and PCB coastline, plus it contains sufficient reserved pins for future upgrades.

Two software development kits are also available for Aurora; a Linux kit and a Windows XPe kit. The Aurora Linux Kit (SDK-AUR-LNX) contains a 4GB USB flashdisk with a bootable linux image pre-loaded, a software CD with the linux tool chain and a backup image, and documentation. The Aurora Windows XPe Kit (SDK-AUR-XPE) contains a 2GB USB flashdisk with a bootable Windows XPe image pre-loaded, a software CD with development tools and a backup image, and documentation.

Altair System Block Diagram

Altair Development Kits

The Altair Development Kit (DK-ALT1600-01) provides all the components you need for fast and efficient embedded development. The kit includes the Altair SBC, cable kit, power adapter cable, a USB flashdisk with Linux pre-loaded, and a software CD with Linux drivers. A Linux software development kit (SDK-ALT-LNX) is also available. This kit contains a flashdisk with a bootable Linux image and a CD with a backup copy of the image plus Linux software development tools.

Altair Cable Kit

The Altair cable kit (C-ALT-KIT) includes cables for most of Altair's on-board I/O. Many cables are also available individually.

EMX I/O Modules

The following EMX I/O modules are available for use with the Altair SBC.

EMX-ESG EMX I/O with 6 serial, 2 Gigabit Ethernet, and 24 GPIO
EMX-ESG624 EMX I/O with 6 serial, and 24 GPIO
EMX-ESGLAN EMX I/O with 2 Gigabit Ethernet
EMX-ESG-GC EMX I/O with 6 serial, 2 Gigabit Ethernet, 24 GPIO, and GPS receiver installed
EMX-ESG624-GC EMX I/O with 6 serial, 24 GPIO, and GPS receiver installed
EMX-DAQ1616 EMX Analog I/O module with 2MHz A/D, D/A, autocalibration, and digital I/O
EMX-GPIO96 EMX Digital I/O module with programmable digital I/O, counter/timers, pwm, and customizable personalities