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Head: Why Settle for Anything Other than the Original?
Deck: PC/104 Supporters Expect Continued Success
By Cheryl Coupé
With new small form factor embedded board standards popping up across the landscape, it might be
easy to underestimate the nearly 20-year-old PC/104 and its extended family. But you’ll hear no hint of
that in this panel. Michele Kasza, VP of sales and marketing for ConnectTech, Flemming Christensen,
managing director at Sundance Multiprocessor Technology, Ltd., and Samuel Phung, VP of sales and
marketing at ICOP Technology, Inc. provide plenty of evidence of PC/104’s ongoing strengths that have
helped it earn its place in the market.
EE Catalog: The vision for PC/104 was to adapt PC technologies for embedded applications. But with
today’s smartphones and tablets challenging PCs and laptops for market dominance, there is a much
wider range of small, low-power, well-supported architectures to choose from. How will this affect the
evolution of PC/104-related standards?
Michele Kasza, ConnectTech: New embedded standards will emerge to take better advantage of lowpower, small architectures. However, existing standards will benefit as well. The new smartphones and
tablets are powerful and feature many complementary modes of interconnecting. This means that the
PC/104 and related world will feature more compatibility and interconnectivity between various devices
and architectures.
Keep in mind PC/104’s areas of core competency; a massive ecosystem of I/O interfaces, high processing
power (in the form of SBCs and FPGAs) and overall robustness. Smartphones and tablets are no rivals to
these strengths.
Flemming Christensen, Sundance Multiprocessor Technology: The vision for PC/104 was to use mainstream technologies and the resulting products are “AvailableRuggedModular” (ARM) and that will
continue into the future. Although the ISA bus is dead on desktop PCs (PCI is likely to go the same
route), the embedded market will have a need for simple technologies for much longer and PC/104
offers that.
PCI Express is now the de-facto method of CPU-to-peripheral communication and it is very simple to
interface the PCI Express bus to either an 8-bit/16-bit ISA or a 32-bit PCI bus, using a low-cost, lowpower FPGA, so I expect to see multicore DSPs, ARMs and ATOMs on a PC/104 card talking to legacy
ISA/PCI cards. The lower power will not only reduce the heat and make enclosures cheaper and lighter,
but also make it possible to use Power-over-Ethernet to remove the need for a 110VAC/230VAC power
supply card and move PC/104 into new non-military/non-industrial use as EMC/CE marking is much
easier as well.
Samuel Phung, ICOP Technology: While there is a broad range of technologies being developed for the
smartphone and tablet markets, technology in these two market places evolve and change rapidly. For
many embedded application projects, stability, version control and certification are critical issues. Stable
technology with long product life-cycle is still important.
In addition, it takes time to validate and build up a collection of quality software used by many of the
key players in this field. It’s difficult to develop quality software around evolving-changing hardware
platforms.
Although technology is expected to change and evolve as part of progress, in the near term, I don’t see
strong impact from the new smartphone and tablet technologies to the current PC/104 market.
EE Catalog: Do you see PC/104 penetrating into markets outside of its traditional mil/aero and industrial
applications? What trends are driving that change?
Kasza, ConnectTech: Any application that can benefit from a modular, flexible architecture are potential
new markets for PC/104 type technologies. We see PC/104 applications emerge in many other sectors
such as energy, including oil/gas and wind turbines, semiconductor processing, civilian aviation and
transportation, to name a few. Any application that requires off-the-shelf components in a robust
environment, yet has complex interface requirements, is a candidate for PC/104. The current trends that
drive the change are lower cost, lower power and the greater flexibility while maintaining robust
qualities.
Christensen, Sundance Multiprocessor Technology: The desktop PC, as we have known and loved since
Apple introduced the concept and IBM made it hugely successful, is going to die as the “desktop/office
PC” and be replaced with an all-in-one touchscreen, fan-less, disk-less workstation. I even think that
notebooks will die and we will have tablets and smart phones with external keyboard and monitors
when we use them as office PCs. Lots of current desktop PCs are used as embedded controllers and
when you can’t add homemade PCI or PCI Express cards to a low-cost desktop PC anymore, then
customers will look for the “Available Rugged Modular” concept and PC/104 fits the bill. The COTS
suppliers of PC/104 cards can lower the prices approximately 25% if only commercial temperature range
is required. Power-over-Ethernet will save space, reduce cost and increased the MTBF as well and make
it suitable for more applications.
Phung, ICOP Technology: While we still see business growth around the PC/104 architecture, we don’t
see obvious business trends outside of the traditional industrial application which we engage in.
EE Catalog: New processor and system-on-chip platforms are enabling new, smaller form factors for
embedded designs. What challenges arise for developers with the evolution to these form factors?
Kasza, ConnectTech: The challenges are varied and include interfacing of new smaller form factors to
real-world applications, along with ensuring a high level of interoperability between various bus
standards. In the computer-on-module space, the task of developing systems has become segregated.
Some companies will develop the core platform (CPU, SOC) while others will design the I/O interfaces.
With time-to-market ever present, rarely will a company take on both.
Christensen, Sundance Multiprocessor Technology: It will be easier! Designing a PCB and building a
board with a 1000-pin device is almost as easy as a 10-pin device with the right tools. The biggest
problem is the power required and the heat generated. The desktop PC has a fan, whereas industrial
embedded systems will not always allow that and the amount of engineering going into getting rid of
heat is bigger than the electronics design. The FPGA vendors are now obsessed with reducing the overall
power required and adding processor blocks to make them easier to program; Intel has taken a major
step forward and integrated an Altera FPGA onto the silicon and TI’s latest floating-point DSP has a
Cortex A9 as well. I can see more systems with 2-4 PC/104 cards, rather than the 4-7 than is most
common today.
Phung, ICOP Technology: During the PC market’s pioneer era, the primary key that helped the PC
market to take shape and propelled the market to grow exponentially to what we see today is the
standardized x86 architecture that has been adopted by all of the key players in this field. Along with the
COTS initiative that takes shape during the past 20 years, most of the technology providers understand
the advantage in supporting an established industry standard. The PC/104 standard was created to
leverage technology and development resources from the PC industry with good timing, which created a
market of its own and sustained the ISA bus to remain in the market until today. During the time when
PC/104 was introduced to the market, there wasn’t another competing standard to hinder PC/104’s
growth. At the time, the PC/104 form factor provided strong value to help companies leverage the
enormous technology and development resources generated by the PC market, which provided real and
tangible business value, a key motivating factor.
In today’s market, there are many new formats and standards introduced by technology companies, as
part of their marketing and business development effort. We should not view these as industry
standards, and should research and question how many key companies actually adopted the standard,
and their underlying reason/purpose. Just a handful of small to mid-size companies supporting a
standard does not necessarily indicate industry-wide acceptance.
While the new generation of processors and systems-on-chips can help simplify the development effort,
to establish and promote a new industry-wide standard with broad acceptance is quite challenging,
which takes time and effort.
Hypothetically, to establish an industry standard, using 12 to 18 months as the average development
cycle, it will take at least 3 to 4 development cycles with strong success to trigger and motivate largescale adoption in the market, which translates to 3 to 5 years under an ideal situation (which is not
likely).
The current market condition is quite challenging for the embedded developer working with new and
evolving technology to select a form factor.
EE Catalog: Are we reaching a saturation point with the number of new standards evolving from
PC/104?
Kasza, ConnectTech: No, there will always be room for new standards involving the PC/104 form factor,
just as there always will be new and emerging PC buses. PC/104 tends to follow the bus architecture
trends of the PC, adapting it to a more robust form factor. For the foreseeable future, the PC chipset and
mother board manufacturers are focused on improving and increasing the bandwidth of existing bus
and architectures, for example PCIe Express 3.0 is being released and DDR4 is on the horizon.
While many PC/104 applications may not require the bandwidth of the PCIe Express 3.0 over 1.0, in
order to use the latest processor architectures and gain their benefits (more processing for less money
and less power) PC/104 manufacturers must support the latest buses. Therefore, whenever the next bus
architecture is developed, PC/104 will be there.
Christensen, Sundance Multiprocessor Technology: A current Volkswagen TV commercial in the United
Kingdom for a non-VW hatchback-type car showed different clips, like:
1. “Closing the door; sounds like a Golf” - The sales man!
2. “The performance; almost like a Golf” – The test driver!
3. “The build quality; almost like a Golf! – The engineer!
The point being that why settle for something else than the Golf? The original hatchback!
The majority of new standards that have evolved from PC/104 are almost all PC/104-compatible in one
way or the other. The specific reason and benefit of all the ‘new’ standards are not 100% clear to me,
but I can only guess that the late arrival of PCI104 Express and PCIe/104 standards are to blame, but it
surely does not help customers.
Pull quote: Keep in mind PC/104’s areas of core competency; a massive ecosystem of I/O interfaces,
high processing power (in the form of SBCs and FPGAs) and overall robustness.
Pull quote: Any application that can benefit from a modular, flexible architecture are potential new
markets for PC/104 type technologies.
Pull quote: Just a handful of small to mid-size companies supporting a standard does not necessarily
indicate industry-wide acceptance.