New Long-life, Celeron ATX Motherboard Meets industrial/embedded applications' need for stability and long term availability
Marc Brown, president of Adastra Systems explains, "Many designers of computerized equipment would like to use off-the-shelf motherboards to take advantage of their low cost and the availability of compatible peripherals and enclosures. They cannot, however, because of the increased costs and problems created on the manufacturing side. Commercial motherboards have a lifetime of about three months, some Taiwanese boards even less. Using them as a component of a dedicated, industrial product with a lifetime of years requires manufacturing to constantly adjust to purchasing changes, new inspection criteria, and changing mechanical specifications. Adastra Systems' ATX-C440 is designed to be stable in form and function for five years. This allows designers to use the commercial ATX form factor and technology in a long-life, industrial product."
The ATX-C440 also supports many embedded features making it even more attractive than the commercial motherboard for industrial applications. These features include a watchdog timer, EEPROM for storing configuration data, industrial grade, latching connectors, AC-power failure detection, flash disk support, and static RAM support.
Based on the Intel 440BX core chipset, ATX-C440 supports socketed Celeron processors to 500MHz, with a 66MHz bus, and up to 256M of SDRAM. The ATX-C440 conforms to the ATX form factor and has one 16-bit ISA slot, three 32-bit PCI slots, and one 2X AGP slot. It has an onboard 15W/channel, PCI sound system, two USB ports, two serial ports (RS-232 with RS-485 as an option), one enhanced parallel port, a dual floppy port, and two independent Ultra DMA-33 EIDE ports.
The ATX-C440 with 400MHz Celeron CPU is available for $420.00, quantity 100. For information, contact Erika de Porcel at 510.732.6900 (voice), 510.732.7655 (fax), or sales@adastra.com (email).
About Adastra Systems
Adastra Systems Corporation designs and manufactures embedded subsystems for the OEM market. The Adastra Systems family of embedded products includes single board computers, embedded peripheral and I/O adapters, and hardware and software development tools. One of the Jumptec Group of embedded PC companies, Adastra's headquarters are located near Silicon Valley in Hayward, California. The company has a strong customer base in a variety of industries, including medical instrumentation, manufacturing automation, multimedia systems, mobile computing and scientific and test equipment. For more information, contact Adastra at Tel: 510-732-6900, Fax: 510-732-7655, and on the web at http://www.adastra.com.