| What does PICMG mean? |
PICMG (PCI Industrial Computer Manufacturers Group)
The PICMG is a consortium of over 500 companies was founded in 1996. It develops specifications for computer technologies used by industrial, military and telecommunication applications.
The main direction of the PICMG Association is to put the computer technologies from the general desktop computers market, to the market which requires more reliability and higher service conditions. The main part of such market consists of the industrial and telecommunication equipment based on the open platform.
The main bus used in the modern comuters is the PCI bus, which had been issued as the know-how of the Intel Co. But now PCI architecture is become the open standard, used in many computer technologies.
The first issue of the PICMG was the specification of the passive backplane, which is used standard method of modules installation for ISA and PCI buses through the lamellar connector (the contacts of the connector are on the card edge). So, the industrial computers are especially manufactured on the basis of ISA&PCI passive backplane. The ISA and PCI slots are located on the card edge.
The PICMG has developed the specifications for the PCI-PCI bridges interface controllers for combination of some PCI passive backplanes. The last PICMG tendencies are directed to the CompactPCI standart specifications developement, which allows hot swapping in a live system and specifications of the systems with the internal telephone bus H110. |
| [questions] |
| How the industrial CPU card can be installed in the expansion slot of the motherboard? |
| The industrial CPU card is not intended for installation into any extension slots of the motherboard. It could be installed on a passive backplane. |
| [questions] |
| Is it possible to install several PICMG processor cards in one chassis? |
| It is possible to assembly up to four independent computers in one one chassis. For this purpose you need use the 4-Systems Passive BackPlane. Each section of this Passive BackPlane has to have independent ISA and PCI buses. And each of this Passive BackPlane can have stand-alone power supply. The example of the similar Passive BackPlane is NBP-2043. |
| [questions] |
| Is it possible for Intel Pentium III processor with bus frequency 133 MHz to operate on the CPU card with bus frequency 100MHz? |
| Yes, it is! But the operation rate will be slower, because having similar core frequency, the multiplication factor of the processor with 133 MHz bus will be less than the processor with 100 MHz bus. The multiplication factor of the processor cannot be changed. |
| [questions] |
| What is the standard PC/104 is? What does it differ from the ISA bus cards? |
During the last 10 year, the PC architecture has been accepted as platform for wider using than desktop applications. The specialized and introduced applications for PC are used as controllers for laboratory gears, telecommunication units and medical equipment, etc. However, standard PC bus (315 x 122 mm) shape factor and its cards are too large for the most introduced monitoring and management applications.
So for more compact PC model bus with limited space for installation, it needs complete hardware and programm compatibility to the popular PC bus standard. It was allowed 100 % transferable on embedded controllers as the PC-compatible hardware, as the software tools for development.
The PC/104 standard was developed for such purpose. This standard architecture has embodied in itself PC compatibility bus for hardware devices and programm applications with ultra compact (90 x 96 mm) accumulated module. And so, PC/104 approaches for unique requests for the introduced monitoring and management applications, including full standardization by international group from more than 160 companies. The ISA-bus have boundary riser PC-104 slot is had contacts in two bus connectors (64 pins in P1, plus 40 pins in P2).
The PC/104 modules can compet with two bus types both 8 bits and 16 bits ones. They are corresponded with ISA bus electrical signals. |
| [questions] |
