San Francisco, Intel Developer Forum (IDF), September 14, 2010 * * *
congatec AG, a leading manufacturer of embedded computer modules, presents conga-QA6, an extended temperature range small form factor module. The conga-QA6 is based on the Qseven® mobile standard and is equipped with the new Intel® Atom™ processor E6xx series as well as the Intel® Platform Controller Hub EG20T. All components of this design are specified for an industrial temperature range of -40°C to +85°C.
The Qseven® standard has been specifically developed to utilize the latest low power consuming technology and to meet the demand for small form factors. It has a typical power consumption of <5 watts, is barely larger than a credit card and has integrated functions for battery and ACPI 3.0 power management. With these specifications, the conga-QA6 is optimized to enable all mobile applications.
The conga-QA6 features fast serial differential interfaces such as PCI Express and Serial ATA but omits support for legacy interfaces like EIDE and PCI. In total it supports 6x USB 2.0, 2x SATA, 1x SDIO, 3x PCIe, LPC bus, I²C bus, Gigabit Ethernet, High Definition Audio, SPI and CAN bus interfaces. The CAN bus and SPI interfaces are new additions to the Qseven® standard and utilize previously unused pins.
As an option, up to 32 gigabytes of robust onboard Flash memory can be provided via the SATA interface. Cheaper memory, in the form of SD-Cards, can also be used with the flexible SDIO interface. Additionally, faster MMC 4.0 cards with a data transfer rate of up to 52 megabytes per second can also be implemented thanks to the 8 bit data width. The SDIO standard supports WLAN, Bluetooth, RFID as well as others.
The Intel® Atom™ processor E6xx series equipped conga-QA6 module offers processing speeds of 600 MHz, 1.0 GHz, 1.3 GHz and 1.6 GHz, combined with 512K L2 cache and features up to 2 gigabytes of onboard DDR2 memory.
Random access memory (RAM) and graphics are embedded in the processor as specified by the new Intel® architecture. The performance of the new embedded
3D-capable graphics engine has been improved by 50% and uses a frame buffer of up to 256 megabytes. The graphics support DirectX 9.0E and OpenGL 2.0, while video applications have the use of MPEG2 and MPEG4 decoders. Graphics output is available via either a 1x24-Bit LVDS channel or an SDVO port. The conga-QA6 module uses the “DisplayID” VESA standard for the automatic recognition of connected flat panel displays.
All congatec boards are equipped with the congatec embedded BIOS. A board controller is also utilized and carries out part of the embedded BIOS extensions. The autonomy of x86 processors means that functions such as system monitoring, as well as the I²C bus, are faster and more reliable even when the system is in standby mode.
