Systems engineers can immediately deploy these boards to upgrade existing Pico-ITX and Mini-ITX designs, benefiting from approximately 30% more processing power and 45% more graphics performance compared to previous generations. With improved performance per watt, they deliver more performance within a given thermal envelope or improve power consumption and battery life for specific performance requirements. Application areas for these new boards are numerous, ranging from small form factor handhelds, box PCs, and IoT gateways to industrial-grade clients, thin HMIs, and low-power GUIs. Markets include smart homes and smart cities, digital signage, retail, medical technology, gaming, and industrial automation, as well as shop floor and logistics systems.
The new conga-PA5 Pico-ITX SBCs and conga-IA5 Mini-ITX motherboards offer impressive security enhancements, improved real-time computing capabilities, and the ability to keep embedded IoT devices synchronized. This is crucial for connected applications such as digital video surveillance, vision-based robotics, Industry 4.0 connected devices, traffic control, and smart energy grids, as well as various connected computing nodes in ships, aircraft, trains, cars, and more.
"With the new boards, the extended temperature range of -40°C to +85°C is once again available in the list of supported features. Therefore, all older designs used with Bay Trail processors can now switch to the new processing cores with an improved feature set. This makes this new generation of motherboards and single-board computers much more attractive than their Braswell processor-based predecessors," explains Martin Danzer. "For IoT designers, the new SIM card connector on our Thin Mini-ITX boards is of particular interest, as it enables very fast cellular connectivity options of up to several hundred Mbit/s and even more with the upcoming virtualized 4G/5G networks.".
Detailed feature set
The new congaC-IA5 Thin Mini-ITX boards and the compact conga-PA5 Pico-ITX single-board computer range are equipped with the especially low-power Intel® Atom™ E3930, E3940 and E3950 processors for the extended industrial application temperature range of -40°C to +85°C, or are equipped with the low-power dual-core Intel® Celeron® N3350 processors and the quad-core Intel® Pentium® N4200 processors.
All variants offer high-performance Intel Gen9 graphics with up to 18 execution units and support up to three independent 4K high-resolution displays via two DisplayPort ++ ports with full 4K @ 60Hz and dual-channel LVDS. The conga-IA5 comes with up to 8GB of low-power DDR3L RAM for cost-sensitive applications, while the conga-PA5 offers 8GB of onboard LPDDR4 RAM with speeds up to 2,400 MT/s. For IoT connectivity and general expansion, there are two Gigabit Ethernet interfaces, one mPCIe slot, three USB 3.0 ports, and up to three USB 2.0 ports. Additional peripherals can be connected via two serial interfaces (RS232/RS422/RS485) and eight GPIOs. Two MIPI CSI camera inputs are also provided. For storage integration, both boards offer up to two SATA Gen 3.0 ports with 6 Gbps, as well as a Micro SD card slot. Audio signals are transmitted via HDA. For security-sensitive applications, both single-board computer families also offer TPM 2.0.
With its larger size, the conga-IA5 Thin Mini-ITX motherboard offers additional interfaces, including a SIM card connector for direct WAN connections to the cloud and IoT, a ccTalk interface and SPI (required in many gaming and vending applications), as well as an additional M.2 slot for storage media and USB 3.0 OTG. The single-board Pico-ITX PC, designed for size-sensitive devices in harsh environments, comes with a USB 3.0 Type-C port that also supports Power Delivery and DP++.
The new Mini-ITX motherboards and Pico-ITX single-board computers are compatible with Windows 10, including Windows 10 IoT, Windriver VxWorks, Android, and common Linux distributions. To simplify the design of these new embedded boards, congatec also offers a wide selection of add-ons, including optimized cooling solutions, I/O panels, and cable assemblies.
The new Mini-ITX motherboards and Pico-ITX single-board computers are compatible with the following CPU versions:
