Yesterday at InnoTrans Kontron announced the expansion of its product portfolio for the transportation market. Launching a series of new railway-compliant 3U CompactPCI products to accelerate OEMs’ time-to-market and reduce hardware design-in costs for a host of rolling-stock and rugged in-vehicle applications, Kontron is offering a full set of building blocks to enable OEMs to quickly compose application-ready platforms with pre-integrated COTS modules. In addition, Kontron announces the availability of a flexible CompactPCI train computing platform later this year, which will feature state-of-the-art Gigabit Ethernet and SATA switching over the backplane.
The EN50155-compliant building blocks include the Kontron CompactPCI extension module CP305-TR, for the Intel Atom-based Kontron CP305 CompactPCI CPU board, as well as the Kontron CompactPCI switch CP3923, both with rugged metric connectors and the Kontron plug-in power supply unit (PSU) CP3-SVE-M100DC. By obtaining railway-compliant products from a single solution provider, OEMs will benefit from faster application development and reduced costs throughout the extended lifecycles in trains. Potential uses can be found in all mobile applications with a need for embedded computers with reliability and longevity, such as light and heavy rail systems, as well as on board various commercial, industrial and military vehicles.
Kontron CompactPCI extension module CP305-TR, for Kontron’s Intel Atom-based CP305 CPCI CPU board
The Kontron CP305-TR is a 3U, 4HP extension module for the Kontron CP305, a 3U CompactPCI CPU board, which combines the record-breaking performance-per-watt ratio of the Intel Atom processor with a feature set tailored to transportation needs. This includes EN50155-compliant reliability, extremely low thermal design power (TDP), plus a soldered processor, chipset and RAM for harsh environments. With two USB 2.0 service ports via M8 connectors and two Fast Ethernet ports via M12 D-coded connectors, it is well suited for all mobile and transportation-oriented applications where robust, mechanically secured connections are required.
Furthermore, the extension module offers two serial interfaces as onboard 10-pin connectors in addition to two SATA connectors. Up to eight GPIO ports are available on an onboard connector (i.e., five inputs and three outputs). Used as an onboard boot medium, the Kontron CP305-TR provides support for a CompactFlash card with the option of additional mechanical fixation.
New Kontron power supply unit CP3-SVE-M100DC
The new EN 50155-compliant plug-in Kontron power supply unit CP3-SVE-M100DC is especially designed to meet the most demanding requirements of harsh train environments with regard to reliability and ruggedization, such as an extended operating temperature range (E2) of -40°C to +70°C (EN50155 TX), a holdup time of 10ms (EN50155 S2) and full EN50155 compliance with regard to shock and vibration, EMC and isolation requirements. With its ultra-wide input range, supporting all voltages between 24VDC and 110VDC, and a maximum output power of 100W, the PSU is suitable for both on-board and wayside applications in the rail sector.
New Kontron Gigabit Ethernet switch CP3923
The new Kontron CP3923 can provide four (CP3923-4M) or eight (CP3923-8M) Gigabit Ethernet ports via rugged M12-D connectors, as well as IPv4/IPv6 routing and full management capabilities. It supports a powerful set of CLI, Telnet, Web and SNMP management interfaces to configure the entire set of protocols and parameters including Layer 2 and Layer 3 (IPv4/IPv6*) protocols, Multicasting, QoS and Security. In addtion, the Kontron CP3923 maximizes the reliability of rugged COTS applications by supporting Intelligent Platform Management (IPMI) and hot-swap capabilities.
Coming up next: Kontron Train Computing Platform
Available later this year, the EN50155-compliant Kontron Train Computing Platform will come in a 19in industrial housing that can be flexibly equipped with Kontron’s railway building blocks for CPUs (Kontron CP305, CP307, CP308), switches (Kontron CP3923-4M), SATA RAID (Kontron CP3693), storage (Kontron CP-HDD-S), system management (Kontron CP3-MGMT) and PSU (Kontron CP3-SVE-M100DC). These building blocks will fulfill a host of railway computing tasks, such as handling passenger information, Internet on train, video surveillance, train control and management systems. For wireless communication, WiFi, GSM, and UMTS modules can be integrated that are readily available on the market.
With the upcoming Kontron Train Computing Platform and Kontron’s comprehensive building blocks for railway applications, developers will benefit from a homogenous product platform that can be specifically tailored to all the computing systems commonly used in trains, thus dramatically reducing the amount of time, effort and money associated with the tailoring, integration and maintenance of railway computing systems.
Prototypes of the Kontron CompactPCI switch CP3923 are now available. The first prototypes of the Kontron CompactPCI extension module CP305-TR will be available in October 2010. Prototypes of the Kontron plug-in power supply unit CP3-SVE-M100DC and the Kontron Train Computing Platform will be available in November. Application-specific OEM versions can be tailored on request.
For more information on the Kontron CompactPCI extension module CP305-TR, please visit Kontron’s website.