At embedded world 2010 in Nuremberg, Germany, on 2-4 March 2010, Kontron will introduce the Kontron MICROSPACE MPCX28R, an EN50155-certified and TX-compliant rugged railway box PC. By receiving certification and compliance, Kontron’s latest rugged Box PC helps OEMs accelerate their time to market and reduce hardware design costs for their railway applications. The longlife and — with 1.6GHz Intel Atom Z530 processor — particularly energy-efficient Box PC offers a 1.5kV isolated power supply and robust M12 interface connector for 2x fast Ethernet, USB 2.0 and power.

Designed for the extended temperature range from -25°C to +70°C and contained in a rugged profiled-aluminium case, the passively cooled Kontron railway box PC is based on the 1.6GHz Intel Atom processor Z530 with 533MHz FSB and supports up to 1GB of DDR2 RAM. The integrated graphics chipset offers 256MB of memory, DirectX 9 3D as well as HDTV support, and the integrated MPEG2 and H.264 decoders reduce processor load while displaying HD video.

Both the bay for one 2.5in SATA 300 hard drive, or SDD, and the slot for compact flash media, are easily accessible from the front. This makes the especially compact and ready-to-install box PC system particularly suitable for passenger infotainment or security applications, as saved media can easily be exchanged simply by swapping out the storage device. Furthermore, for customer-specific extensions, the robust railway box PC features a PCI/104 expansion slot for ultra-thin and space-saving PCI/104 expansion cards. Application-specific enhancements such as dual-CAN, GPS, GSM/UMTS or WLAN can easily be integrated via two PCI Express® Mini Card slots. An eSATA port also allows the use of an external data storage medium to further extend storage capacity.

For integration into railway applications, the comprehensive interface offerings of the Kontron MICROSPACE MPCX28R box PC include especially rugged M12 interface connectors grant a reliable and failure safe connection for 2x fast Ethernet (one LAN boot, two wake-on-LAN), one USB 2.0 port and the power connector for the 1.5kV isolated power supply (24V-110V). In addition, the front of the box PC offers two USB 2.0 ports, two 3.5mm jacks for stereo input and output, and a SIM slot for mobile communications.

On the rear there are two additional USB 2.0 ports and DVI-I for analogue and digital video signals with a resolution of 2048px x 1536px on external monitors. Two robust D-sub connectors for COM ports (RS232C / RS422/485) and additional DC-isolated digital I/Os round out the feature set.

Besides remotely-controlled on and off functionality, the system also enables customer-specific event-driven functions such as wake-on-ring or wake-on-LAN.

The new Kontron MICROSPACE MPCX28R railway box PC supports Windows XPe/XP/Vista/7 and Linux. The fully EN50155, CE and E1-compliant and TX-certified series products are expected to be available in Q1 2010 in EMEA and in Q4 2010 in North America and APAC.