More Modules

May 24, 2007

Building with off-the-shelf parts continues to deliver the fastest time-to-market. The trick, of course, is to find the right boards or modules to get there. Ampro's COM 830 and 840 (see figure) are based on the COM Express standard. The COM 840 can

William G. Wong

Building with off-the-shelf parts continues to deliver the fastest time-to-market. The trick, of course, is to find the right boards or modules to get there.

Ampro's COM 830 and 840 (see figure) are based on the COM Express standard. The COM 840 can run a 2.2-GHz Intel Core Duo processor with an 800-MHz front-side bus. The rugged module has an x16 PCI Express interface, two Serial ATA (SATA) ports, eight USB 2.0 ports, Gigabit Ethernet, IDE, and AC'97 audio. The boards support up to 4 Gbytes of SODIMM DDR2 667 RAM. Pricing starts at $500.

VersaLogic's Python EBX motherboard (see figure) holds a fanless, low-power, 800-MHz LX 800 processor from AMD. It has analog and low-voltage differential signaling flat-panel outputs for 18- and 24-bit displays, dual 10/100 Ethernet, four USB 2.0 ports, four COM ports, plus IDE and LPT ports. It has 32 digital I/O pins, eight 12-bit analog channels, and three pulse-width modulation outputs. It also uses VersaLogic's new SPX expansion sites for SPI peripherals. Pricing starts at $630.

Ampro • www.ampro.com
Versalogic • www.versalogic.com

About the Author

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

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I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

I still get a hand on software and electronic hardware. Some of this can be found on our Kit Close-Up video series. You can also see me on many of our TechXchange Talk videos. I am interested in a range of projects from robotics to artificial intelligence.