MSC Vertriebs GmbH has expanded its ETE family according to the ETX™ specification 3.02 with the Intel® Atom™ processor technology based ETE-A945GSE embedded module. With the new configurable platform, MSC underlines its commitment to the worldwide proven ETX™ module standard and ensures the long-term availability of ETX™ products for at least another seven years. The ETX™ technology thereby remains attractive, also for new embedded computing designs.

In the first version, the ETE-A945GSE ETX™ platform integrates a low-power Intel® Atom™ N270 CPU running at 1.6 GHz. The energy-efficient processor offers enough computing power for most of the typical ETX applications in the POS, infotainment, gaming and HMI markets. The Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator 950, integrated in the Mobile Intel® Chipset 82945GSE with ICH7DH Southbridge, supports dual display operation via two LVDS interfaces or in the combination LVDS and CRT. As a special feature the MSC module offers an LVDS interface with full 24-bit and dual channel support enabling high-resolution displays with up to 16 million colors. The CRT interface delivers an accuracy of 2048 x 1536 pixels.

The computer-on-module offers two SATA II (up to 300 MB/s) and two enhanced IDE (ATA/UDMA100) ports. From the six available USB 2.0 interfaces, two connections are constructed as loss-free high speed interfaces in the form of mini-USB Connectors on the top side of the module. The board has a 32bit PCI bus interface and an enhanced ISA Bridge (PCI/ ISA Bridge ITE8888). Moreover there are an 10/100Base-T LAN interface, an AC'97 audio interface, parallel and serial ports, an IrDA interface and connections for keyboard and mouse.

The 95 x 114 mm ETX™ module offers additional functions such as ACPI power management with suspend-to-RAM support, watchdog and system monitoring. Memory can be expanded via an SODIMM socket up to a capacity of 2 GB DDR2 SDRAM.

MSC provides baseboards for the evaluation and the design-in of the ETX™ platform ETE-A945GSE. The module runs under the operating systems Windows® XP (embedded), Windows® CE™ and Linux.

The board integrates the TrustedCore BIOS of Phoenix Technologies for highest Security functionality compliant to the requirements of the Trusted Computing Group (TCG).

With a typical power consumption of just 10 W, the ETE A945GSE module is also suited for small systems with passive cooling.