Advantech Enters 6U VPX Market for rugged modular computing

The MIC-6311 is designed to operate in both standard as well as rugged conditions supporting both soldered ECC memory as well as solid state storage to withstand increased shock and vibration levels without sacrificing reliability. A conduction cooled version enables extended temperature support for even harsher environments. The board is an ideal choice for applications that require the use of accelerated floating point operations for maximum performance. MIC-6311 customers can take advantage of the enhanced Intel Advanced Vector Extensions (Intel AVX) 2.0 instruction set to enable operations at over 340 GFLOPS.

OpenCL support allows programmers to tap into the on-die GPU functionality providing outstanding performance in high performance embedded computing markets including real-time signal and image processing. Several new processor instructions for fused multiply/add have been implemented to accelerate signal processing algorithms used extensively by graphics and imaging programs. In addition, the processor’s integrated enhanced Iris graphics engine offers twice the performance over previous generations and brings triple independent display support, making the MIC-6311 a compelling choice for command and control workstation applications.

“The MIC-6311 addresses a growing demand from transportation and defense customers in the Asia-Pacific region and was designed to meet the needs of data intensive applications, in particular in radar, imaging and signals intelligence (SIG-INT).” said Peter Marek, senior director x86 solutions, Advantech Networks and Communications Group. “By combining 4th generation Intel Core processors with the rugged OpenVPX form factor and adding SRIO interconnects, the MIC-6311 allows customers to process more data faster, in a reliable and deterministic manner and scale out over a SRIO interconnect optimized for low-latency peer-to-peer multi processing”.

The MIC-6311 is designed with two SRIOx4 ports in the VPX data plane and two PCI Express x8 gen. 3 lanes in the VPX expansion plane for compute intenseapplications. The two Serial RapidIO ports allow the board to be interfaced to digital front ends such as DSP and FPGA cards via a high speed, low latency deterministic interconnect. In addition, PCI Express ports with up to 8GB/s throughput offer a high performance interface to mainstream peripherals and I/O cards. With a SO-DIMM socket and additional soldered, onboard DRAM with ECC in a dual channel design running up to 1600MT/s, the board offers the ability to fit harsh environments while maintaining maximum memory throughput and supporting memory expansion using the latest SO-DIMM technology.

The MIC-6311 implements an onboard soldered, industrial SSD for maximum reliability. By using new and powerful features in the Intel QM87 PCH with its integrated advanced SATA controller, various storage options are supported such as an onboard 2.5 SATA III HDD/SSD socket offering high storage capacity with up to 6Gbps transfer speed. A CFast socket provides an alternative for implementing a cost efficient, pluggable SSD while three SATA backplane ports allow for system mount storage. An onboard XMC/PMC site with PCIe x8 gen.3 connectivity can host high speed offload or I/O mezzanines such as Advantech’s MIC-3666 dual 10GE card. Two USB 3.0 ports in front panel can connect to the external devices with up to 5Gbps data rate. Console, network and remote connectivity can be achieved via a RS232 console and two GbE RJ45 front ports as well as two GbE backplane ports powered by the latest Intel i350 Gigabit Ethernet Controller.

Triple independent display support can be implemented by using the MIC-6311’s VGA front panel port and two Display port / HDMI interfaces on rear transition modules. Audio port support via the backplane interface enhances media support. Four USB ports (2x USB 3.0, 2x USB 3.0) are also connected to backplane to fulfill thedemand for extra IO ports and twoUART interfaces can be leveraged to interface to legacy devices and consoles.

The commercial version of the MIC-6311 is available for OEM sampling now with the conduction cooled version in preparation. The board comes with comprehensive software support from Advantech’s ecosystem alliance partners for Windows, Linux and VxWorks.