Single Board Computers

Single board computers (SBC) have a wide number of interpretations. My focus is on SBC devices based on the family of specifications maintained by the PC/104 Embedded Consortium:

• PC/104 – 3.6" x 3.8" single board computer with 104-pin ISA bus
• PC/104-Plus – 3.6" x 3.8" single board computer with both 104-pin ISA bus and 120-pin PCI bus
• PCI-104 – 3.6" x 3.8" single board computer with only 120-pin PCI bus
• EBX – 5.75” x 8.00” single board computer
• EPIC – 4.53” x 6.50” single board computer

SBC devices provide an interesting combination of advantages:

• Complete x86 instruction set compatibility for use with a wide range of operating systems and software languages.
• Scalable in several dimensions including stacking multiple boards, higher performance processors, higher performance bus architectures and increase of on-board RAM.
• Flexible usage as standalone product, embedded product controller or add-on board to accelerate a specific software function in a standard PC based system.
• Potential for use with parallel processing and grid computing systems.
• Fast migration path from prototyping to finished production manufacturing.
• Small form factor, no moving parts and durable industrial design.
• Lead free and RoHS compliant.
• Mature commercial standard (the first PC/104 specification was released in March 1992).

Single board computers are commonly used for automative, telecommunications, transportation and other industrial control and monitoring applications. They are also used for interactive set-top boxes, point of sales (POS) devices and thin client computing.

My focus is on the use of single board computers in two areas:

1. Authentication systems that are data and calculation intensive, e.g. knowledge based authentication, color based authentication and image based authentication.
2. Dedicated hardware acceleration to improve performance and security for financial trading and analytics systems. This is similar to standard computer operating systems off-loading graphics processing to dedicated graphics processing boards.

Currently, I use the MOPSlcdLX (Minimized Open PC System) board with an AMD Geode LX800 processor at 500MHz and the AMD Geode CS5536 companion device. This product is manufactured by Kontron AG. For development, the board is fitted with 1GB RAM and 1 GB CompactFlash using IDE interface.

Figure 1. MOPSlcdLX board next to a CD-ROM for relative size indication.
Read more:

• Development environment
• Hardware test run