| Kontron drives PCI Express bus to PISA |
Mar. 01, 2005
 Kontron unveiled a new board-level embedded computer form-factor leveraging PCI Express technology, at the Embedded World conference in Germany this week. Dubbed "PISA Express," the approach combines PCI and PCI Express buses in a half-size "slot board" format modeled after the ISA/PCI-based "PISA" standard introduced by Kontron in 1996.
(Click for larger view of PISA Express board mockup)
According to Kontron, the PISA Express bus is implemented on a 360-pin card edge connector pinout (see photo above). The bus supports a maximum of two PCIe x1 slots, one PCIe x4 slot, one PCIe x16 slot, three PCI slots, one LPC bus, and two Express cards, the company says. Additionally, the standard includes power connections compatible with ATX and BTX motherboard standards.
Kontron points out that PCI Express offers significant performance advantages over earlier slot board standards. "One PCIe x1 slot with 250 MB/s in full duplex operation is nearly twice as fast as one PCI slot, and the PCIe x16 slot offers performance of approximately 16 GB/s per direction," which is "clearly more than AGP," the company says. Another big advantage, according to Kontron, is the fact that PCI Express establishes point-to-point connections via switches. Consequently, "the connected I/O assemblies no longer have to share bandwidth and slow plug-in cards don't slow down faster ones."
"PISA Express is ideal for the development of space-saving embedded systems that need fast PCI Express performance, but cannot do without proven PCI I/O assemblies," Kontron commented. "Moreover, the CPU board sits much more firmly in the slot thanks to the two-level interface, and is therefore more resistant to vibrations," the company added.
Kontron's initial PISA Express CPU board offering will be based on a 1.8GHz Intel Pentium M 745 or 1.0GHz Intel ULV Celeron M 373 processor and a DDR/DDR2 SDRAM slot. Onboard functions will include: 2 Gigabit Ethernet ports, 3 USB 2.0 ports, sound, 4 serial ports, parallel port, PS2 keyboard/mouse ports, 2 serial and 1 parallel ATA interfaces, and both DVI A&D and JILI video interfaces.
Kontron says it plans to release PISA Express as an "open specification, freely available at no cost," and that the spec will be offered for download at www.pisa-express.com during Q2, 2005.
"As with PISA, other companies are invited to participate in this market with PISA Express," Kontron said.
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