Ampro Corporation 486E manual Chapter, General Description, Features, CPU/Motherboard

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 high quality single-board 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 reliability demands of embedded applications.

Among the many embedded-PC enhancements that ensure fail-safe embedded system operation are a watchdog timer, a powerful NMI generator, and an onboard bootable “solid state disk” (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 Module (DIMM™) 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.

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