EMBEDDED PC104 SYSTEMS AND BOARDS

Please use the links below that provide information about all our embedded products.

ISA (AT and XT)PC104 is a family of embedded computer standards that define both form factors and computer buses by the PC104 Consortium. Its name derives from the 104 pins on the ISA inter-board connector in the original PC104 specification and has been retained in subsequent revisions, despite connector changes. PC104 is intended for specialized environments requiring a small, rugged computer system. The standard is modular and allows consumers to stack together boards from a variety of COTS (Commercial Off-The-Shelf) manufacturers to produce a customized embedded system.

Ascend Electronics® PC104 computing and IO solutions are designed from the ground up to meet the PC104 standard and the rigors of harsh and hostile environments, and these include the extreme cold -40°C to the extreme heat to 85°C of surrounding environments, and withstanding high g-force caused by shock and vibration. We optimize feature density, size, and cost using innovative ideas and technologies to create the perfect-fit solution. Our embedded pallet of products includes finish systems and broads providing single board computers, diverse I/O’s, Human Machine Interface, and power. We carry different standardized form factors.

Specification	Initial Release	Bus Communication	Current Version
PC/104	1992	ISA (AT and XT)	2.6
PC/104-Plus	1997	ISA and PCI
PCI-104	2003	PCI	1.1
PCI/104-Express and PCIe/104	2008	PCI and PCI Express	3.0

ISA

Industry Standard Architecture (ISA) is the 16-bit internal bus of IBM PC/AT and similar computers based on the Intel 80286 and its immediate successors during the 1980s. The bus was backward compatible with the 8-bit bus of the 8088-based IBM PC, including the IBM PC/XT and IBM PC compatibles.

The 16-bit ISA can also be used with 32-bit processors. An attempt to extend ISA to 32 bits, called Extended Industry Standard Architecture (EISA), was unsuccessful marketing-wise. Later buses such as VESA Local Bus and PCI were used instead, often along with ISA slots on the same mainboard. Derivative bus structures are still used in ATA/IDE, the PCMCIA standard, CompactFlash, the PC/104 bus, and internally within Super I/O chips.

Even though ISA disappeared from consumer desktops many years ago, it is still used in industrial PCs, where certain specialized expansion cards that never transitioned to PCI and PCI Express are used.

ISA is still used today for specialized industrial purposes, including the realization of modern motherboard for Intel Core 2 Duo processors and Core i3/i5/i7 processors, which contains one (non-DMA) ISA slot.

ISA and PCI (PC/104-Plus)

The PC/104-Plus standard supports the PCI bus, and the ISA bus of the PC/104 standard. The name is derived from its origin: a PC/104-Plus module has a PC/104 connector (ISA) plus a PCI connector. The standard defines a 120-pin connector for the PCI bus, located on the opposite side of the board from the PC/104 connector. PC/104-Plus CPU boards provide active communication on both buses and can communicate with ISA and PCI peripheral cards. On PC/104-Plus peripheral modules, the PC/104 connector is simply a passive connector for stackability; the module actively communicates on the PCI bus only. PC/104-Plus peripheral module can not be used with a PC/104 CPU board. However, a PC/104-Plus CPU board may be used with a PC/104 peripheral module.

Since PC/104-Plus is based on PCI, there is no need to set a Base Address, IRQ, or DMA channel on the peripheral boards. However, it is necessary to specify the PCI Slot Number of a peripheral board when it is installed (set by a rotary switch, DIP switch, or jumpers on the peripheral board). Each PCI peripheral board in the system must have the PCI Slot Number set to a unique value. Failure to do so may cause erratic system behavior. The peripheral closest to the CPU should be set for the first slot, and the next board should be set for the second slot, etc.

PCI and PCI-X

Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) is a local computer bus for attaching hardware devices. The PCI bus supports the functions found on a processor bus but in a standardized format independent of any given processor's native bus. Devices connected to the PCI bus appear to a bus master to be connected directly to its own bus and are assigned addresses in the processor's address space. It is a parallel bus, synchronous to a single bus clock. Attached devices can take either the form of an integrated circuit fitted onto the motherboard (called a planar device in the PCI specification) or an expansion card that fits into a slot.

The first version of PCI was a 32-bit bus using a 33 MHz bus clock and 5 V signaling, although the PCI 1.0 standard provided a 64-bit variant as well. Version 2.0 of the PCI standard introduced 3.3 V slots. Version 2.1 of the PCI standard introduced optional 66 MHz operation. A server-oriented variant of PCI, PCI Extended (PCI-X), operated at frequencies up to 133 MHz for PCI-X 1.0 and up to 533 MHz for PCI-X 2.0. PCI and PCI-X sometimes are referred to as either Parallel PCI or Conventional PCI to distinguish them technologically from their more recent successor PCI Express.

PCIe

PCI Express (PCIe ) (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express) is a high-speed serial computer expansion bus standard designed to replace the older PCI and PCI-X. PCIe has numerous improvements over the older standards, including higher maximum system bus throughput, lower I/O pin count and smaller physical footprint, better performance scaling for bus devices, a more detailed error detection and reporting mechanism, and native hot-swap functionality. More recent revisions of the PCIe standard provide hardware support for I/O virtualization.

The PCI Express electrical interface is measured by the number of simultaneous lanes. A lane is a single send/receive line of data. The analogy is a highway with traffic in both directions. The interface is also used in various other standards, such as the laptop expansion card interface called ExpressCard. It is also used in the storage interfaces of SATA Express.

Many devices formerly available on Parallel PCI expansion cards are now commonly integrated onto motherboards or available in USB and PCI Express versions.

Ascend Electronics® PC104 commitment:

Original product manufacturer - Own In-house production
Compliant to the highest standards and requirements
Product Support as long you have our Product in use!
100% support of Legacy Interface
We only choose components from the “embedded road map” (long availability)
Industrial functions such as Temperature Supervision and Special Power Management
Over voltage protection and ESD Protection on board
All Connectors according to class 2 – industrial grade
Outstanding international technical support team
All Products are initially shock and vibration tested

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Quality control:

Automated Optical Inspection (AOI)
Function test on board level including Software
Final test with verification
72 Hours operational Burn-In Test, 10 Cycles from -40°C to 85°C
Minimum of 200 cold boots at different temperatures within full temperature range with 15 Minutes soak

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