Designed to simplify and accelerate the development of collaborative robotics and material handling systems, these smart mobility platforms are suitable for deployment in outdoor temperatures from -45°C to +85°C.
Typical targets range from the next generation of real-time connected, functionally safe self-driving vehicles to smart manufacturing and material handling applications ranging from collaborative and cooperative robots to substitutive solutions such as robots for THT assembly of PCB boards.
OEM vendors of next generation smart logistics vehicles and manufacturing robots have to integrate vision and various other sensors for gathering situational raw data, need to implement data pre=processing and artificial intelligence (AI) to improve data analytics, and design controller logic for autonomous vehicle movement and operation. In addition, they need 5G device connectivity for vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-x communication, or respectively, robot-to-robot and robot-to-x-communication – all of which needs to be implemented with real-time capabilities and functional safety.
“congatec positions itself as the embedded computing platform and ecosystem provider that supports smart logistics vehicle and manufacturing robot vendors comprehensively in all these tasks, from TSN capable rugged Computer-on-Modules for the extended temperature ranges and real-time hypervisor technologies to application ready OEM platform building blocks provided by our constantly expanding network of solution partners,” said Yoonsun Kim, country manager at congatec Korea.
Among the new modules being launched are the Intel Xeon D processor based COM-HPC Server module, which is intended for industrial edge servers and 5G campus network equipment; the 12th Gen Intel Core processor based COM-HPC Client and COM Express modules for smart vehicle/robot gateways and vehicle/robot network controllers; as well as Intel Celeron, Pentium and Atom processor based Pico-ITX Single Board Computers (SBCs) for application ready real-time processing cores for industrial edge computing applications.
The COM-HPC Server modules in Size E and Size D with Intel Xeon D processors are designed to accelerate the next generation of real-time microserver workloads in industrial factories and outdoor environments with extended temperature ranges.
Improvements include up to 20 cores, up to 1 TB RAM, double throughput per PCIe lane compared to Gen 3, as well as up to 100 GbE connectivity and TCC/TSN support. Target use cases in smart factory applications range from servers deployed in 5G tactile internet applications to edge servers for larger machines and manufacturing equipment.
Featuring 12th Generation Intel Core processors (formerly codenamed Alder Lake), the new congatec modules in COM-HPC Size A and Size C as well as COM Express Type 6 form factors offer major performance gains and improvements for the next generation of smart mobility systems and collaborative manufacturing robots.
Engineers can now leverage Intel’s innovative performance hybrid architecture. With up to 14 cores on BGA variants, 12th Gen Intel Core processors provide a quantum leap in multitasking and scalability to accelerate multithreaded vehicle and robotic applications and to execute dedicated real-time tasks more efficiently.
In addition, with up to 96 Execution Units, the integrated Intel Iris Xe graphics is estimated to deliver improvements of up to 129% in GPGPU processing to accelerate parallelized workloads such as AI algorithms, as compared to 11th Gen Intel Core processors.
The Pico-ITX boards with Intel Atom x6000E Series processors or Intel Celeron and Pentium N & J Series processors (code named “Elkhart Lake”) are designed for edge-connected embedded systems. They deliver an improved graphics performance, with up to three simultaneous displays running at 4kp60 and multi-thread computing power on up to 4 cores.
Further benefits are Time Sensitive Networking (TSN), Intel Time Coordinated Computing (Intel TCC) and Real Time Systems (RTS) hypervisor support as well as BIOS configurable ECC and extended temperature options from -40°C to +85°C.
