Computer-on-Modules to withstand extreme temperatures

This technical feature set is complemented by a comprehensive service offering that includes temperature screening, high speed signal compliance testing along with design-in services and all training sessions required to simplify the use of congatec’s embedded computer technologies.

Typical use cases for the new industrial-grade COM-HPC and COM Express modules can be found in any kind of rugged applications, outdoor edge devices and in-vehicle installations, which increasingly leverage embedded vision and artificial intelligence (AI) functions for which congatec provides extensive support as well.

Typical verticals are industrial automation, railway and transportation, smart infrastructure including mission critical applications such as the energy, oil and gas sector, mobile ambulance equipment, telecommunication, or security and video surveillance, to name just a few.

Based on the new low-power high-density Tiger Lake SoCs, the new modules for wide temperature environments offer greater CPU performance and reportedly nearly three times higher GPU performance, along with PCIe Gen4 and USB4 support. The most demanding graphics and compute workloads benefit from up to four cores, eight threads and up to 96 graphics execution units for massive parallel processing throughput in an ultra-rugged shape.

The integrated graphics can be used as parallel processing unit for convolutional neural networks (CNN) or as an AI and deep learning accelerator. Using the Intel OpenVINO software toolkit that includes optimised calls for OpenCV, OpenCL kernels, and other industry tools and libraries, workloads can be extended across CPU, GPU and FPGA compute units to accelerate AI workloads, including computer vision, audio, speech, language, and recommendation systems.

The TDP is scalable from 12 to 28W, enabling truly immersive 4k UHD system designs with passive cooling only. The impressive performance of the ultra-rugged conga-HPC/cTLU COM-HPC module and the conga-TC570 COM Express Type 6 module has been made available in a real-time capable design and also includes real-time hypervisor support from Real-Time Systems for virtual machine deployments and workload consolidation in edge computing scenarios.

Andreas Bergbauer, Product Line Manager at congatec, said: “Services and support are absolutely key for standard based products. That’s why we complement our rugged product offering for all the new edge applications in challenging environments with a comprehensive eco system for each product.

“This includes optimisation for real-time computing – including support for Time Sensitive Networking (TSN), Time Coordinated Computing (TCC) and RTS Realtime Systems Hypervisor, remote management support and finally all required signal compliance services as high-speed signaling with PCIe Gen 4 and USB4 is a serious challenge these days, making carrier board design tasks increasingly complex.”