The highlight of this week was attending PCB Carolina in Raleigh, just 30 minutes away from WDL HQ in Pittsboro, NC. 

We set up a webpage for the show with products we knew attendees and exhibitors would find interesting.  Our focus was on products that accelerate time to market, decrease development costs, add intelligence, build in scalability, and allow developers and contract manufacturers to focus on their core competencies and avoid reinventing the wheel.

That meant we were focussing primarily on board level products but we did bring a few system-level products to the show to introduce the range of rugged fanless PCs available from our vendors Perfectron and SeaLevel Systems .

A number of attendees expressed relief at finding us and potential solutions for clients who are still using DOS, PC/104, ISA bus, IDE harddrives, and floppy drives. We can forget that a vast swath of industrial applications are still relying on the most basic of x86 processors and old school interfaces as we anxiously await the newest NVIDIA Jetson GPUs and breathlessly announce new COM Express modules featuring Tiger Lake and AMD EPYC!

And, because it is far easier and less expensive to design a carrier board with application specific I/O than to resolve the complexities of getting a processor, memory, and power management up and running, grateful developers checked out industry standard COM Express, SMARC, Q7, and ETX form factors featuring a range of Intel and AMD processors. We are pleased to have the most reliable and well recognized manufacturers in the industry on our linecard. 

The Computer-on-Module approach means equipment developers don’t worry with complex computer system design ~ only the easier to design carrier board is application specific. Manufacturers can choose from a wide variety of ADLINK COMs to satisfy requirements for performance, cost, power consumption, size, and I/O.

Industry standard computers-on-module from Kontron are available in the popular COM Express, SMARC, and ETX form factors. These highly integrated modules feature the latest CPUs and deliver complete core functionality. This allows developers to build semi-custom embedded PCs by designing application specific features into a baseboard.

Computers-on-module from TQ provide the latest processor technology. Take advantage of industry standard form factors with x86 architecture, or proprietary modules with the powerful performance & low energy consumption of Arm architecture, or the fast data transfer rates of Power architecture!

For solutions that support legacy DOS applications all the way to solutions with the latest Intel processors, ICOP has you covered with industry standard PC104 & 3.5” SBCs & SMARC & ETX computers-on-module. 

You don’t even have to design the carrier board for your computer-on-module! Connect Tech has been manufacturing solutions for the embedded market for over 30 years, including ready-to-deploy COM Express, SMARC, Q7, and ETX carrier boards! Their COM Express family includes carriers for Type 10, Type 6, and Type 7 modules.

The Connect Tech COM Express® Type 6 Ultra Lite Carrier Board matches the Type 6 form factor and offers convenient PC Type connectors. It supports the latest Intel® processor sets, provides Mini-PCIe Expansion and an additional GbE port, and supports temperature ranges of -40ºC to +85ºC.

Definitely check out our PCB Carolina landing page for more information on NVIDIA Jetson carriers and systems from Connect Tech, flash and memory solutions from Innodisk and Swissbit, industry standard computers-on-module from ADLINK, Connect Tech, Kontron, TQ, and ICOP, proprietary computers-on-module from ICOP and TQ-Systems, embedded modems from MultiTech, and the very cool ROS 2 ready ROScube from ADLINK! We’ll be back next week with more Products of the Day. Don’t forget you can check these out daily on our homepage or by following us on social media using the links below!