Placing XTX™ into an existing ETX® design allows the customer to expand their applications to the newest technologies available such as PCI Express™ and Serial ATA.
- XTX™ is 100% backwards compatible to the ETX standard (Rev. 2.7) if the ISA bus is not required.
- The ISA bus can be implemented through the use of a PCI-ISA bridge on the customer specific baseboard. As an alternative to this the customer can use the readily available XTX™ LPC bus offered on the congatec board.
- Most customer specific baseboards will not require a redesign in order to use congatec’s XTX™ board.
- The additional XTX™ signals do not affect the onboard ISA functions.
- Complete re-usability of the existing mechanical design.
congatec not only offers our customers the latest in innovative products but also extensive design-in support.
In addition to the 32bit parallel PCI bus XTX™ offers 4 PCI Express™ lanes. These lanes can be configured as 4x1, 2x2 or 1x4 and offer the ability to connect up to 4 external devices. This allows the customer to equip their embedded PC application with the next generation of PC performance. PCI Express™ is a low pin count interface with maximum bandwidth per pin. This results in cost optimization and very compact solutions with the highest I/O performance. The scalable bandwidth is 2.5GBit/s per lane. With the 4 PCI Express™ lanes available on XTX™, devices with a high demand for bandwidth like Gigabit Ethernet or very fast video are easily connected.
Serial ATA is an enhancement of the parallel ATA therefore offering higher performance. As a result of this enhancement the traditional restrictions of parallel ATA are overcome with respect to speed and EMV. Serial ATA starts with a transfer rate of 150 Mbytes/s and can be expanded up to 600 Mbytes/s in order to accommodate future developments. Serial ATA is completely protocol and software compatible to parallel Ultra ATA.
XTX™ supports up to two ExpressCard™ slots. ExpressCard™ is the successor to PCMCIA. This interface allows the use of USB 2.0 and PCI Express™ applications as well. The ExpressCard™ standard offers a new performance class in a small package.
As a replacement to the no longer supported ISA bus, XTX™ offers the LPC (Low Pin Count) bus. There are already many devises available for this Intel defined bus. The LPC bus corresponds approximately to a serialized ISA bus yet with a significantly reduced number of signals. Due to the software compatibility to the ISA bus, I/O extensions such as additional serial port can be easily implemented using the LPC bus.
XTX™ offers additional signals and functions to further improve power management.
- Fan control using a PWM (pulse width modulation) output
- Fan surveillance/monitoring
- Battery support
In cooperation with the System Management bus (SM bus) the integrated congatec board controller supports new features/functions such as tamper proof and monitoring while in soft off mode.
XTX™ offers two additional USB 2.0 ports. This allows for the connection of up to 6 USB 2.0 devices to maximize the connectivity of your embedded solution.
Next to standard audio support (Line-in, Line-out, Mic), XTX™ offers a digital audio interface for AC97 or High Definition Audio codecs (HDA). The following features are available:
- DVD Audio
- Multi stream capabilities
- Telephony (VoIP)
- Dolby 5.1/6.1/7.1
- Dynamic connector configuration
- Conferencing
- THX
- Power saving improvements
XTX™ can utilize several audio codecs. This allows for the easy implementation of telephone and audio applications that require the highest sound quality and numerous channels.
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