Deggendorf, Germany, September 25th, 2008 * * * congatec AG continues to enhance its highly successful COM Express product family with the unveiling of the economically priced conga-CA945 module. The new module features the Intel® Atom™ processor N270 and the full-featured Mobile Intel® 945GSE Express chipset in conjunction with the Intel® I/O Controller Hub 7-M.
The complete design of this compact (95x95mm) COM Express type 2 compatible module delivers excellent performance-per-watt at optimized price levels. The total thermal design power (TDP) of the processor/chipset combination is only 8 Watts, making applications that typically require less than 5 Watts ideal for this module. Combining this low power consumption with ACPI 3.0 battery management also provides the ability to create fully-featured mobile embedded applications.
The conga-CA945 supports three PCI Express Lanes, eight USB 2.0 ports, two serial ATA, two Express Cards, one IDE Interface and Intel® High Definition Audio. Additionally, it features a 32-Bit PCI bus, multi master I²C bus, LPC bus, fan control and Gigabit Ethernet. A DDR2 SODIMM socket allows for flexible memory configuration up to 2 GBytes in size.
The conga-CA945 is powered by the 45nm Intel Atom processor N270 that is equipped with 512 kByte L2 cache. It operates at 1.6 GHz clock speed and utilizes a 533 MHz front side bus. Thanks to the Intel® Speedstep® Technology, this robust performing CPU will rarely reach its maximum power consumption value of 2.5 Watts when used in real-life applications. The Intel Atom processor N270 includes 2‑Threads support in order to allow for virtualization. The conga-CA945 acts like a dual-core system and can independently operate two operating systems simultaneously.
The Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator 950, which is integrated within the Mobile Intel 945GSE Express chipset, allows for more than 10 GB/s bandwidth to a maximum of 224 MByte video memory allocation to provide power-efficient 32-bit 3D graphics. Both independent graphic pipelines can use either dual-channel LVDS, single SDVO or analog VGA. The conga-CA945 implements the Embedded Panel Interface (EPI) and the VESA DisplayID standard allowing for automatic recognition of the attached flat panel display.
All congatec modules are equipped with an embedded BIOS and a board controller that enhance embedded features such as system monitoring, watchdog timer and the I²C bus. With the ability to isolate itself from the main x86 processor, these features are also made available in stand-by mode, hence promoting further power saving functionality. In addition to enhanced power management, the congatec Embedded BIOS supports ACPI 3.0 with battery management.
Availability
First samples of the conga-CA945 will be available at the end of November 2008.
