Does a selection of processors, connectivity and format mean board specifiers can find exactly what they need?

But there is also a growing number of ARM based boards coming on the market; based either on a microcontroller format or a microprocessor format, such as Freescale's i.MX range. Boards are available with a range of connectivity options and come in a range of shapes and sizes. Faced with such choices, where does an engineer start? Zeljko Loncaric, a marketing engineer with board developer congatec, commented on the choice of processor. He said: "At the moment, there is a lot of hype around the latest ARM based processors, such as the Cortex-A9 based Freescale i.MX6. These processors are filling the gap where typical pc features are required – for example, mobile industrial multimedia applications – but with the lowest power consumption. "For x86 oriented customers, Intel Atom fulfills the requirements of very compact applications, offering mid range performance and low power consumption. "But, for more graphics intensive applications requiring good price/performance, the AMD G-Series and R-Series APUs are an ideal choice." He also noted that, in areas where extreme performance is required, the latest 4th Generation Intel Core processors will prove popular. Rod Clarke, managing director of BVM, noted that around 95% of his company's sales come from Intel based devices. "We see little call for anything else. ARM based technology has come from the deeply embedded world and we see those boards as being targeted at dedicated applications." Nevertheless, Clarke doesn't see Atom based boards meeting all requirements. "The low power Celeron processor is a step up," he noted. "It has a few of the things that are missing from Atom and brings more performance." But he sees potential for some of the latest offerings from AMD. "It's always been there, but we'll be looking more closely in the future. The G-Series is becoming available, but I don't think it's anything like an Atom at the low power end of the market." Rod Anders, managing director of Anders Electronics, believes all ARM based devices are following the same path. "More power, lower energy," he said, "but they all do the same thing." His focus is more on graphics and interfacing than processing power. "Freescale devices range from single to quad cores, which can support two high definition displays. In general, graphics processors are being integrated into the cpu, but from the end user's point of view, if they are selecting a non consumer products, they will need to think about availability. However, it's not so much the processor, more about what surrounds it." Loncaric added: "In general, the new ARM based processors are establishing themselves in the low power segment and they bring better longevity than x86 based devices." Anders says graphics and the interface are the more interesting elements in what he thinks has become a bit of a dull market. "The ability to come out with a board which will have a major impact is difficult, but not impossible, because the market is mature. "But 80% of the products with which our boards are used feature a display and 80% of those use touch technology. Even though projected capacitive touch is the number one touch technology, most boards only support resistive as standard. That's interesting; it brings us business because you can't plug and play projective and we're not seeing chip or board manufacturers addressing this issue." Anders believes the Freescale i.MX range supports multitouch applications well. "But I think touch is too slow when implemented on Intel's dual core i7. It shows that designers need to think beyond the processor when selecting boards." In Loncaric's opinion, multimedia features are now an important element. "Things like better video streaming, encoding and decoding are popular, as well as OpenCL support for processors with integral gpus, such as AMD's G- and R-series." Clarke says his customers, who come from a range of market sectors, are typically driving one or two screens from their boards. "So they're looking for LVDS if the embedded system features a screen. For larger external screens, they will still look for a vga output." He also pointed to growing interest in DVI, the Digital Visual Interface. Designed to transport uncompressed video, the DVI specification allows resolutions of 1280 x 1024 to be transmitted to a remote display, which can be up to 15m away from the board. Loncaric said: "Many customers are driving dual independent displays, depending on the application, and most processors in our range will support this." However, he took a different slant to Clarke when it came to the interface. "VGA and LVDS will supported, depending on the vendor, until 2015. DisplayPort and embedded DisplayPort are becoming the most important interfaces, but HDMI isn't overly popular." Anders said: "Graphics continue to be an important element of this market, but many of the applications will not feature large screens. It's the touch interface which is more important." One of the more challenging selection parameters is board format – congatec offers the Qseven, ETX, XTX and COM Express formats for example. "Qseven is a popular format," Loncaric said, "and many designs are based on this open standard. COM Express is a larger format and better suited to stationary applications." BVM's Clarke pointed to Mini ITX as the most popular amongst his customer base. "There are a lot of chips and 'metalwork' available, which makes Mini ITX a good starting point for many designs. We also see a fair percentage of our business being generated by 3.5 and 5.25in embedded boards." For the future, Clarke sees good potential for the Pico ITX format. "It's a smaller format – half the size of Mini ITX – and supports very low power high performance applications." Asked about communications interfaces, Loncaric said a single gigabit Ethernet port meets most application requirements. "But in comms or server applications, you may need at least two." Anders agreed: "Some applications will need a second Ethernet port." Clarke noted that COM ports were still important and added that customers were looking for 'lots of USB ports'. "They're also looking for multiple Ethernet ports." In the end, processing power is a big influence on what board is selected and the imminent arrival of Intel's Fourth Generation iCore cpus may have a significant impact on designers. Loncaric believes Fourth Generation processors will establish themselves rapidly in the market. "They will bring extreme performance to such applications as medical imaging, automation equipment and gaming machines." Clarke concluded: "We'll be getting Fourth Generation based boards this month and they will bring users full high performance."