Mini-ITX and Pico-ITX boards feature security enhancements

With improved performance per watt, they unleash more performance at a given thermal envelope or improve energy consumption and battery life for given performance requirements. Application areas for these new boards are numerous and range from small sized handheld devices, box PCs and IoT gateways to industrial-grade Thin Clients, slim HMIs and low-power GUIs. Markets can be found in smart homes and smart cities, digital signage and retail, medical technology, gaming and industrial automation, as well as in shop floor and logistic systems.

The new conga-PA5 Pico-ITX SBCs and conga-IA5 Mini-ITX motherboards feature security enhancements, improved real time computing capabilities as well as the ability to keep the embedded systems of IoT devices in sync. This is of great importance for connected applications such as digital video surveillance, vision based robotics, industry 4.0 connected devices, traffic control and smart energy grids, as well as various connected computing nodes on ships, planes, trains, automobiles and more.

"With the new boards, the extended temperature range of -40 to +85°C is back again on the supported features list. Consequently, all older Bay Trail processor based designs can now switch to the significantly higher performing new processing cores with enhanced feature set. This makes this new generation of motherboards and single board computers far more attractive than its Braswell processor based forerunners," explained Martin Danzer "For IoT designers, the new SIM card socket on our Thin Mini-ITX boards is of particular interest as it enables new and very fast cellular connectivity options with up to several hundreds of Mbit/s and even more with upcoming virtualized 4G/5G networks."

The feature sets in detail
congatec's conga-IA5 Thin Mini-ITX boards and the comparably slim line conga-PA5 Pico-ITX SBCs are equipped with the particularly energy-saving Intel Atom processors E3930, E3940 and E3950 for the industrial-grade extended temperature range of -40 to +85°C, or are fitted with the higher performing low-power dual-core Intel Celeron N3350 and quad-core Intel Pentium N4200 processors.

All variants offer the high-performance Intel Gen9 graphics with up to 18 execution units and support up to three independent high-resolution 4k displays via 2x DP++ with full 4k@60Hz and dual channel LVDS. The conga-IA5 comes with up to eight GB DDR3L of power saving RAM for cost sensitive applications, whereas the conga-PA5 offers eight GB LPDDR4 RAM onboard with up to 2,400MT/s. For IoT connectivity and generic extensions, there are two Gigabit Ethernet interfaces, mPCIe, three USB 3.0 and up to three USB 2.0 ports. Additional peripherals can be connected via two serial interfaces (RS232/RS422/RS485) and eight GPIOs. Two MIPI CSI camera inputs are further provided. For the integration of storage media, both boards offer up to two SATA Gen 3.0 with 6Gbps as well as a Micro SD card slot. Audio signals are carried via HDA. For security-sensitive applications both SBC families also offer TPM 2.0.

With its larger footprint, the conga-IA5 Thin Mini-ITX motherboard offers additional interfaces including a SIM card socket for direct WAN connections to cloud and IoT, a ccTalk interface and SPI required in many gaming and vending applications, as well as an additional M.2 slot for storage media and USB 3.0 OTG. The Pico-ITX SBC, which is designed for size-sensitive devices in harsh environments, comes with an USB 3.0 Type C supporting also Power Delivery and DP++.

The Mini-ITX motherboards and Pico-ITX single board computers support Windows 10, including the Windows 10 IoT versions, Windriver VxWorks, Android and common Linux versions. To simplify the design-in of these new embedded boards, congatec also offers a comprehensive choice of add-ons including optimised cooling solutions, I/O panels and cable sets.