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Chapter 1

Introduction

General Description

The Little Board™/486e CPU is an exceptionally high integration, high performance, 486DX-based
PC/AT compatible system in the EBX form factor. This rugged and hig h quali ty single-bo ard
system contains all the component subsystems of a PC/AT motherboard plus the equivalent of six
PC/AT expansion boards.
Key functions included on the Little Board/486e CPU are:
! CPU
! RAM
! Embedded-PC BIOS
! Keyboard and speaker interfaces
! Four buffered serial ports
! Multimode parallel port
! Floppy drive controller and local-bus IDE drive controllers
! Flat panel/CRT display interface
! Ethernet LAN interface
In addition, the Little Board/486e CPU includes a comprehensive set of system extensions and
enhancements that are specifically designed for embedded systems. It is designed to meet the size,
power consumption, temperature range, quality, and re liab ility d emand s of e mbedd ed app lica tions.
Among the many embedded-PC enhancements that ensure fail-safe embedded system operation are
a watchdog timer, a powerful NMI generator, and an onbo ard bo ot able “so lid state dis k” (SSD )
capability. The unit requires a single +5 Volt power source and offers "green PC" power-saving
modes under support of Advanced Power Management (APM) BIOS functions (APM Release 1.2-
compliant).

Features

CPU/Motherboard

The Little Board/486e CPU implements a fully PC-compatible motherboard architecture, with an
80486 CPU running at 100 MHz or 133 MHz. The 486 CPU has an 8 Kbyte on-chip cache memory.
The board uses a standard 168-pin Dual In-line Memory Mo dule (D IMM ™) memory module , and
supports up to 64M byte configurations. It has a full complement of standard PC/AT architectural
features, including DMA channels, interrupt controllers, real-time clock, and timer counters.