embedded PC

On Tue, 08 Apr 2008 08:41:53 -0700, the renowned John Larkin
<jjlarkin@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:

>(also posted to s.e.d.)
>
>
>We're considering a new product, a spectroscopy controller, that would
>need a fair hunk of data-moving power and gigabit Ethernet capability
>to talk to a host system. We would center it on a largish FPGA that
>would run the actual physics, but we still need supervision,
>self-test, local maintanance capability (maybe just RS-232) and the
>Ethernet stuff. Possibilities include...
>
>1. Do everything in the FPGA. Possible but nasty.
>
>2. Use a cpu chip on the main board, next to the FPGA. Both powerQuicc
>and Blackfin chips have the horsepower and include the gbit PHY. Both
>run uC Linux.
>
>3. Use an embedded board-level PC,
>
>  3a  PC/104+. Expensive.
>
>  3b  Some small-form-factor "regular" pc motherboard. Cheap.
>
>both 3's would probably use the PCI bus to talk to the FPGA.
>
>
>Economically, and for speedy development, 3b sounds best. Has anybody
>done things like this with one of the tiny PC motherboards? Can you
>recommend a form-factor and a vendor? We'd need gbit Ethernet and a
>free PCI slot to interface to the process. We could maybe live with
>100M Ethernet if we were confident that an upgrade would be available
>in a year or two.
>
>The thing that scares me about using an embedded PC is that the
>product lifetimes tend to be short.
>
>John

Have you considered Micro ATX? 



Best regards, 
Spehro Pefhany
-- 
"it's the network..."                          "The Journey is the reward"
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