Once again facing the issue of safety-critical embedded applications, MEN Mikro Elektronik has introduced the first 3U CompactPCI board with conductive cooling at Embedded World 2009. The F50C is based on Freescale’s MPC8548 and was particularly designed for application in harsh environmental conditions.

Conduction cooling for extreme environments

The new F50C is based on Freescale’s MPC8548 with clock frequencies between 800MHz and 1.5GHz. The 3U CompactPCI single-board computer supports rear I/O and comes with a specially designed CCA frame for conductive cooling by standard. This frame gives the card 5 HP in size and allows the SBC to be used in MEN’s conductive cooling housing in a temperature range of -40°C to +85°C. With front I/O and a heat sink for convection cooling the F50P sister board is also available for application in common 19in systems.

The F50C has 2GB ECC DDR2 SDRAM main memory, a 16GB solid state flash disk (SSD) for application data and an industrial FRAM and SRAM.

The single-board computer supports up to 3Gb Ethernet channels, four USB ports, up to two SATA interfaces and a multitude of user-definable functions inside its FPGA. These may include graphics, touch, serial and fieldbus interfaces as well as binary I/O – depending on the needs of each application. All of the F50C’s interfaces are accessible via the J2 rear I/O connector.

All components of the F50C are firmly soldered against shock and vibration. In addition, the card is ready for coating against dust and humidity.