Boards/Backplanes

To meet demand for programmable resistor solutions, Pickering Interfaces has introduced two ranges of PCI cards. The first range are PCI RTD simulator cards, which are intended for the emulation of PT100 and PT1000 resistive temperature sensors and have fine setting resolution characteristics.

A development board for wearable and IoT designs has been introduced by Seeed. LinkIt ONE, a collaboration with MediaTek, is based on Aster SoC. The features of the board include: ARM7 EJ-STM, GSM, GPRS, WiFi, Bluetooth BR/EDR/BLE, GPS, Audio codec and an SD card connector.

RS Components is now taking orders for the new SparqEE development boards, which have been designed to enable easy cellular connectivity and Internet access for projects based on the Raspberry Pi and Arduino platforms.  A total of seven new SparqEE boards are available to order exclusively from RS, including the CELLv1.0 – a tiny cellular development board that implements a 2G+3G chipset to provide wireless worldwide.

A high performance FPGA-based interface and processing card in the Advanced Mezzanine Card (AMC) form factor, has been released by CommAgility. The AMC-V7 is based around a high-density Xilinx Virtex-7 FPGA and is suitable for LTE wireless front-end systems requiring multiple 10G CPRI links at up to rate option 8.

Farnell element 14 and RS Components have launched Raspberry Pi B+. This new version has been developed with a close ear to customer feedback and meets many of the requests that have flowed back since the multi-million, credit-card sized computer was launched just over two years ago.

The latest in the company's network interface series of FPGA Mezzanine Cards (FMCs), VadaTech has introduced the FMC108 with high-speed interfaces up to 40GB speeds. This FMC features dual QSFP+ ports for 40GbE/SRIO, PCIe and Aurora, and also cages for dual QSPF+, SPF+ and RJ-45 as well as some quad cage versions.

A motherboard suitable for gaming, automation and digital signage applications, has been introduced by IBASE. The MI987 Mini-ITX motherboard, which is built on the latest 22nm process technology, is based on the Q87 chipset designed to support socket LGA1150 4th Generation Intel Core i7/i5/i3 processors. Compared to its predecessors, the board provides increased processing and graphics performance.

Farnell element14 has launched Texas Instruments MSP430 ULP (ultra low power) FRAM LaunchPad, a development platform which combines embedded FRAM (Ferroelectric Random Access Memory) and a holistic ultra low-power system architecture. The new addition to the LaunchPad family, MSP-EXP430FR5969 - an easy-to-use Evaluation Module for the MSP4305969 microcontroller enables developers to reduce energy budgets, minimise product size and enable a batter...

An industrial-grade Mini-ITX motherboard, suitable for a variety of applications, has been launched by Advantech. The AIMB-225, which is based on the AMD Embedded G-series SoC, is suitable for use in gaming machines, surveillance, ATM/Kiosks and automation. Due to the board's SoC and SUSIAccess remote management software, the motherboard provides high-performance graphics and efficient system management.

A free online tool for backplane product design has been released by Molex. The Backplane Pin Map Configurator is designed to shorten time-to-market, guiding users through a series of inputs to identify backplane parameters and generate a pin map for their backplane application. The tool is available free on the Molex website.