SMARC 2.0 design guide published at embedded world

9th March 2017

SGET e.V.

Alice Matthews

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The final version 2.0 of SGET Standardisation Group for Embedded Technologies e.V.'s SMARC design guide has been announced. The new design guide which applies to the latest SMARC 2.0 specification will be shortly released on the SGET website. Last year the SDT.01 workgroup published the new SMARC 2.0 specification to enhance the feature set and repurpose selected V1.1 pins that are currently underused for new interfaces.

There has been positive feedback from the industries and many application designers are ready to start a SMARC 2.0 carrier board design. The upcoming design guide document will support this and will give detailed schematics and layout recommendations to implement all the new features on carrier boards according to the specification.

During the work on the design guide small improvements – mainly due to typo errors on the existing SMARC 2.0 specification have been found – were summarised in an errata document which is also now available together with the specification document on the SGET website.

In SMARC 2.0 specification the following interfaces are added: 2^nd channel LVDS, a 2^nd Ethernet port, a 4^th PCI Express Lane, extra USB ports (now 6x USB 2.0 + 2x USB 3.0 superspeed signals), x86 power management signals, eSPI and DP++. “The summary is, that SMARC 2.0 is now perfectly suited for interfaces supplied by x86 as well as ARM processors and it offers more multimedia interfaces, too”, explains Martin Unverdorben, chairman of the SMARC Standard Development Team (SDT.01). Up to three digital displays will be supported: As primary display 2x 24 bit LVDS or eDP or MIPI DSI can be used, the secondary display can either be HDMI or DP++, and the third display can be DP++.

First products compliant to the SMARC 2.0 specification are already available by member companies of SGET e.V., and many products will be displayed at “embedded world” in Nuremberg (14^th-16^th March 2017). For a complete list of SMARC 2.0 products see the product support list on the SGET web site.

Other companies in the embedded computing industry are invited to join SGET e.V. and contribute their ideas. Apart from embedded computing manufacturers on board and system level, also chip and connector manufacturers, research and educational institutions as well as embedded system integrators, OEM solution providers and industrial users are most welcome.

Active participating companies in the workgroup SDT.01 currently working on the new design guide: Adlink, Advantech, congatec, Kontron, MSC Technologies, Portwell, Technagon.