Modular AGX Orin Carrier Board Speeds Prototyping
What you'll learn:
- Why use Osbourne instead of NVIDIA's development kit?
- Why include a connector board?
Diamond Systems' Osbourne carrier board is design to host NVIDIA's popular AGX Orin module (see figure). The AGX Orin is designed to provide artificial intelligence (AI) at the edge for real-time implementation of large language models (LLMs) and other AI models.
The module is available as part of the NVIDIA development kit that I've looked at, but it falls short as a practical platform for deployment. Essentially, it's not as good a prototyping platform for rugged hardware development. This is where the Osbourne shines.
The Osbourne is actually a pair of boards that mates with an AGX Orin module. The main carrier board plugs into a connector board that's ideal for prototyping. It could be used in a production environment, but typically this would be replaced with a custom board that has only the necessary interfaces for an application.
The main carrier board includes an M.2 E key and M.2 M key socket. which tend to be the more difficult interfaces to design. However, the connectors are relatively easy to implement in a custom board. The carrier board and connectors support these interfaces:
- 3x USB 3.2 ports
- 4x USB 2.0 ports
- 1G/2.5G/5G/10G Multi-Gigabit Ethernet port
- 10/100/1000-Mb/s Ethernet port
- 4 x4 or 8 x2 lane CSI-2 camera interface using industry-standard adapter socket
- 2x software-configurable RS-232/422/485 ports with TTL option on one port
- 2x fixed RS-232 ports
- HDMI 2.0a/b directly from Orin module
- Audio I/O via ALC5640 CODEC
- 8x digital I/O via I2C I/O expander
- 2x CAN 2.0 ports with non-isolated transceivers
- 2x mPCIe full-size sockets with PCIe and USB support
- M.2 M key (2280 or 2242) NVMe expansion slots (4 lane PCIe Gen 3)
- M.2 E key 2230 socket
The AGX Orin is a system-on-chip (SoC) that incorporates a 1.3-GHz GPU with 2048-core NVIDIA Ampere cores and 64 Tensor Cores. It can deliver 275 TOPS of performance to significantly boost AI performance. It also has a multicore Arm Cortex-A78AE processor complex along with onboard eMMC memory.
Related Links
A Hands-On View of NVIDIA's Jetson AGX Orin
More Rugged Systems
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William G. Wong
Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF
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