Deggendorf, Feb. 23, 2005 - congatec AG moves forward by introducing XTX™, which is an improvement to the well-recognized ETX® standard. Removing the ISA bus opens the door to powerful new features like PCI Express, SATA and more.
congatec AG proves that even well established standards have a high potential for improvement. The recently announced standard XTX is based on ETX® Rev. 2.7 but replaces the old fashioned ISA bus with latest I/O technologies like PCI Express, SATA and additionally USB 2.0. With the XTX standard it's possible to vastly improve the I/O performance, which is often the biggest bottleneck for fast processors.
XTX enhances the PCI bus by offering four PCI Express Lanes. This enhancement alone offers data throughput that is more than 10 times the speed of a single 32bit PCI bus.
To control slower peripheral devices the 32bit PCI bus remains available. A 400 kHz I²C bus is available for the easy connection of sensors, transmitters and serial data storage. LPC bus, a serialized ISA bus, which is fully software compatible has also been added to the XTX specification.
Fast mass storage devices can be connected using four serial ATA interfaces. Parallel ATA is still available to support cost efficient and rugged CompactFlash devices.
XTX™ supports up to two ExpressCard™ slots. ExpressCard™ is the successor to PCMCIA. This interface allows the use of USB 2.0 and PCI Express™ applications as well. The ExpressCard™ standard offers a new performance class in a small package.
Next to the standard audio support (Line-in, Line-out, Mic), XTX™ offers a digital audio interface for AC97 or High Definition Audio codecs (HDA) that can be implemented on the baseboard. This feature can be applied to IP telephony or even high fidelity audio with many channels.
The power management improvements offered by the XTX standard enable monitoring and speed control of fans and also allow detailed system monitoring even when the system is switched to standby mode.
XTX - the fast way to new technologies
With XTX most existing ETX® designs can be upgraded to new technologies easily. When not using the ISA bus XTX is 100% backward compatible to ETX®. There are no mechanical changes required when upgrading to XTX.
XTX Products
congatec will launch the first XTX based products in the second quarter of 2005. Along with congatec the XTX standard is already supported by Embedded Logic. congatec invites all manufacturers to use XTX in order to close the gap between ETX® and COM Express.
