Harsh environment cards provide ±15kV ESD protection

The mPCIe-ICM cards have been designed for use in harsh and rugged environments such as military and defence along with applications such as health and medical, point of sale systems, kiosk design, retail, hospitality, automation and gaming.

The RS232 ports provided by the card are 100% compatible with every other industry-standard serial COM device, supporting TX, RX, RTS, and CTS. The card provides ±15kV ESD protection on all signal pins to protect against costly damage to sensitive electronic devices due to electrostatic discharge.

The cards provide Tru-Iso port-to-port and port-to-PC isolation. The serial ports on the device are accessed using a low-profile, latching, 5-pin Hirose connector. Optional breakout cables are available, and bring each port connection to a panel-mountable DB9-M with an industry compatible RS232 pin-out.

The mPCIe-ICM cards were designed using type 16C950 UARTS, and use 128B transmit/receive FIFO buffers to decrease CPU loading and protect against lost data in multitasking systems. Systems can continue to interface with legacy serial peripherals, yet benefit from the use of the high performance PCI Express bus. The cards are fully software compatible with current PCI 16550 type UART applications and allow for users to maintain backward compatibility.

The mPCIe-ICM series is especially useful in applications where high common-mode external voltages are present. Isolation is required to guard electronics from transient voltage spikes and offers greater common-mode noise rejection in electrically noisy surroundings containing industrial machinery and inductive loads. These applications include factory automation, energy management, military/mission-critical, industrial ON/OFF control, security systems, manufacturing test, process monitoring, and kiosks. In addition to protecting industrial applications from the influence of high external voltages, isolation eliminates troublesome ground loops.