PC-104 format for single-board PCs may appear to be out-dated and may be regained by COM Express, but there are numerous producers of them and numerous COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) military uses for them. PC/104 boards are accessible in several flavors from many makers around the globe. Regardless of what you need, you’re prone to find it in a PC/104 module. And And all of these boards work together, so your system comes together fast. if you want to add functionality at a later date,simply add another board to the stack. The stackable format cards are PC-based — like x86 processors and related software. and they are comparatively low in costing.
Diamond Systems(manufacturer of boards):
Diamond Systems’ Athena III PC/104 single SBC features a 1.0-GHz Intel Atom E640T CPU, 1 Gbyte of soldered-on DDR2 DRAM, a Gigabit Ethernet port, and a data acquisition system. It can meet IEC68-2-27 shock specification and MIL-STD-810E 514.4 vibration specs and has a −40°C to 80°C operating temperature range. The boards data acquisition includes a 16-channel 16-bit A/D with 150-kHz sample rate and four 12-bit D/A channels.
As an example application, we can look at a weapons station control system that was done by a European military equipment manufacturer and provided to the U.S. Army’s vehicle program. The unit controls a gunnery system from inside a moving military vehicle, which is often traveling over rough terrain. The manufacturer selected a custom variation of the Athena II SBC as the control processor. The SBC needed to be small and have full analog, digital, and serial I/O with excellent analog calibration accuracy and a graphical display interface.
The customer took advantage of Diamond Systems ruggedization program that added conformal coating of the SBC and flash disk. The gunnery system also is exposed to a relatively large amount of shock and vibration, and the SBC had to pass MIL-STD-810E 514.4 vibration tests. To successfully meet the specification, Diamond replaced all standard connectors with latching versions that had increased contact plating. In addition, the PC/104 connector, due to potential vibration wear between the mated contacts, was replaced by a high-reliability MIL style connector. All of the setup jumpers were replaced with soldered zero-Ω resistors and, to counteract the effects of extreme vibration over and above that of the MIL-STD-810, all of the BGA chips were under-filled to eliminate any solder bond cracking between the board and the BGA lands. Diamond has since updated the SBC to the Athena III version (backward-compatible).
