Modules And Motherboards

March 13, 2008

Modules and small motherboards like VIA Technologies’ Pico-ITX or Kontron’s nanoCOMExpress offering are designed to pack commercial off-theshelf (COTS) performance into a small package (see the table). The ever-expanding set of opt

William G. Wong

Modules and small motherboards like VIA Technologies’ Pico-ITX or Kontron’s nanoCOMExpress offering are designed to pack commercial off-theshelf (COTS) performance into a small package (see the table). The ever-expanding set of options is necessary to address new interconnects such as PCI Express and Serial ATA (SATA).

Although the standards are extensive, there is still room for innovation such as the SPI expansion found on VersaLogic’s EBX motherboard (see “Fanless EBX Goes RoHS” at www.electronicdesign.com, ED Online 15316). Form factor often is critical, but so are interfaces. Finding the right combination may take a little searching, but it beats building from scratch.

KONTRON • www.kontron.com
VERSALOGIC • www.versalogic.com
VIA TECHNOLOGIES • www.via.com.tw/

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.