GLOSSARY-Embedded Controller


System
Environmental

 
Gigabit Ethernet
Express Card
Mini Card
ATX Power
Wallmount
Watchdog Timer

PCI Express Slot
Embedded Controller
MXM Graphic
Intel L7500
DDRIII
DVI-I

 

VGA
PS/2
RJ-45
USB 2.0
Red Hat
SATA/IDE

Gigabit Ethernet:
Gigabit Ethernet, also known as GbE or 1 GigE, is a term describing various technologies for transmitting Ethernet frames at a rate of a gigabit per second. Half-duplex gigabit links connected through hubs are allowed by the specification but in the marketplace full-duplex with switches are normal. Ethernet has evolved into the most widely implemented physical and link layer protocol today. Fast Ethernet increased speed from 10 to 100 megabits per second (Mbit/s) and Gigabit Ethernet was the next iteration, increasing the speed to 1000 Mbit/s. The initial standard for gigabit Ethernet was produced by the IEEE in June 1998 and required optical fiber. There are four different physical layer standards for gigabit Ethernet using optical fiber (1000BASE-X), twisted pair cable (1000BASE-T), or balanced copper cable (1000BASE-CX).
Express Card:
The Express Card is an interface to allow peripheral devices to be connected to a computer. The Express Card standard is implemented as one or more slots built into, usually, a portable computer, and cards to be inserted into a slot and containing electronic circuitry and connectors to which external devices can be connected. The ExpressCard standard replaces the PC card (also known as PCMCIA or CardBus) standards. ExpressCard plug-in hardware available includes TV tuners, mobile broadband cards, FireWire 800 (1394B), Serial ATA external disk drives, solid-state drives, wireless network interface cards, TV tuner card common access card (CAC) reader and soundcards. Media remote control units are available that use the ExpressCard slot to store and recharge.
Mini Card:
A Mini Card may also be referred to as a mostly obsolete Flash memory card, the Miniature Card. It i s a flash or SRAM memory card standard first promoted by Intel Corp. in 1995 and backed by Advanced Micro Devices, Fujitsu and Sharp Electronics. Miniature Card Implementers Forum (MCIF) promoted this standard for consumer electronics: PDA/Palmtops, Digital Audio Recorders, digital cameras and smartphones. The Miniature Card is 37 × 45 × 3.5 mm thick and can have devices on both sides of the substrate. 60-pin connector was a memory-only subset of PCMCIA and featured 16-bit data and 24-bit address bus with 3.3 or 5-volt signalling. Miniature Card supports Attribute Information Structure (AIS) in the I²C identification EEPROM. The Miniature Card format competed with SmartMedia and CompactFlash cards, also released during the mid-1990s. Although they were all significantly smaller than Type I PC Cards, the CompactFlash and SmartMedia cards were more successful in the consumer electronics market.

ATX Power:

ATX (Advanced Technology Extended) is a computer form factor designed by Intel in 1995. It was the first big change in computer case, motherboard, and power supply design in many years. ATX overtook AT completely as the default form factor for new systems. ATX addressed many of the AT form factor's annoyances that had frustrated system builders. Other standards for smaller boards (including microATX, FlexATX and mini-ITX) usually keep the basic rear layout but reduce the size of the board and the number of expansion slot positions. In 2003, Intel announced the BTX standard, intended as a replacement for ATX. As of 2009[update], the ATX form factor remains a standard for do-it-yourselfers; BTX has however made inroads into pre-made systems. The official specifications were released by Intel in 1995, and have been revised numerous times since, the most recent being version 2.3, released in 2007. A full size ATX board is 12 in × 9.6 in (305 mm × 244 mm). This allows many ATX form factor chassis to accept microATX boards as well.

Wallmount:

A bracket used to affix a computer to a vertical wall.

Watchdog Timer:

A watchdog timer (or computer operating properly (COP) timer) is a computer hardware or software timer that triggers a system reset or other corrective action if the main program, due to some fault condition, such as a hang, neglects to regularly service the watchdog. The intention is to bring the system back from the nonresponsive state into normal operation. Watchdog timers can be more complex, attempting to save debug information onto a persistent medium; i.e. information useful for debugging the problem that caused the fault. In this case a second, simpler, watchdog timer ensures that if the first watchdog timer does not report completion of its information saving task within a certain amount of time, the system will reset with or without the information saved. The most common use of watchdog timers is in embedded systems, where this specialized timer is often a built-in unit of a microcontroller. For those embedded systems that can't be constantly watched by a human, watchdog timers may be the solution.

PCI Express Slot:

PCI Express (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express), officially abbreviated as PCIe (or PCI-E, as it is commonly called), is a computer expansion card standard designed to replace the older PCI, PCI-X, and AGP standards. PCIe 2.1 is the latest standard for expansion cards that is available on mainstream personal computers. PCI Express is used in consumer, server, and industrial applications, as a motherboard-level interconnect (to link motherboard-mounted peripherals) and as an expansion card interface for add-in boards. A key difference between PCIe and earlier buses is a topology based on point-to-point serial links, rather than a shared parallel bus architecture.
Embedded Controller:
An Embedded Controller is simply a device that performs Embedded control. The embedded market is a part of the overall DAQ market. The main differentiating feature of an embedded controller is that all system operation is not controlled by external PC. In fact the CPU running the system is actually built into the I/O system itself. While a typical, slaved data acquisition system is hosted by some type of general purpose Personal Computer complete with mouse, monitor and other human interface devices (HID), an Embedded Controller's processor is usually dedicated to controlling the I/O system and often does not provide any direct human interface.
MXM Graphic:
MXM Graphic is a standard interface defined between PC systems and graphics subsystems. MXM covers the mechanical, electrical, thermal, and software interface, including the connector.
Intel L7500:
The Intel Core 2 Duo Low Voltage L7500 is part of Intel's Core 2 Duo Mobile series. The L7500 codenamed "Merom" features 4 MB of L2 cache, a core clock speed of 1.60 GHz, and a front side bus of 800 MHz. The CPU is on a 65nm die and contains 2 processor cores. Being part of the Low Voltage series, it has a Thermal Design Power of 17W

DDRIII:

In electronic engineering, DDRIII or double-data-rate three synchronous dynamic random access memory is a random access memory interface technology used for high bandwidth storage of the working data of a computer or other digital electronic devices. DDR3 is part of the SDRAM family of technologies and is one of the many DRAM (dynamic random access memory) implementations. DDR3 SDRAM is an improvement over its predecessor, DDR2 SDRAM, and the two are not compatible. The primary benefit of DDR3 is the ability to transfer at twice the data rate of DDR2 (I/O at 8× the data rate of the memory cells it contains), thus enabling higher bus rates and higher peak rates than earlier memory technologies. In addition, the DDR3 standard allows for chip capacities of 512 megabits to 8 gigabits, effectively enabling a maximum memory module size of 16 gigabytes.
DVI-I, VGA, PS/2:
The Digital Visual Interface (DVI) is a video interface standard designed to provide very high visual quality on digital display devices such as flat panel LCD computer displays and digital projectors. It is designed for carrying uncompressed digital video data to a display. It is partially compatible with the High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) standard in digital mode (DVI-D), and VGA in analog mode (DVI-A).

Video Graphics Array (VGA) through its widespread adoption has also come to mean either an analog computer display standard, the 15-pin D-subminiature VGA connector or the 640×480 resolution itself. While this resolution was superseded in the personal computer market in the 1990's, it is becoming a popular resolution on mobile devices. VGA was the last graphical standard introduced by IBM that the majority of PC clone manufacturers conformed to, making it the lowest common denominator that all PC graphics hardware supports, before a device-specific driver is loaded into the computer today. For example, the MS-Windows splash screen appears while the machine is still operating in VGA mode, which is the reason that this screen always appears in reduced resolution and color depth. VGA was officially superseded by IBM's XGA standard, but in reality it was superseded by numerous slightly different extensions to VGA made by clone manufacturers that came to be known collectively as "Super VGA".

The PS/2 connector is used for connecting some keyboards and mice to a PC compatible computer system. Its name comes from the IBM Personal System/2 series of personal computers, with which it was introduced in 1987. The PS/2 mouse connector generally replaced the older "serial mouse" connector, while the PS/2 keyboard connector replaced the larger 5-pin DIN. The PS/2 designs on keyboard and mouse interfaces are electrically similar and employ the same communication protocol. However, a given system's keyboard and mouse port may not be interchangeable since the two devices use a different set of commands. Following the release of USB keyboards, PS/2 keyboards and mice have become less popular.

RJ-45:

A Before the name RJ-45 was used to refer to computer networking connectors, RJ-45 was originally a telephone-only standard. It is one of the many registered jacks, like RJ-11, another telephone standard. As a registered jack, telephone RJ-45 specifies the physical male and female connectors as well as the pin assignments of the wires in a telephone cable. The original RJ-45 uses a special keyed 8P2C modular connector, with Pins 5 and 4 wired for tip and ring of a single telephone line and Pins 7 and 8 connected to a programming resistor. It is meant to be used with a high speed modem, and is obsolete today. The only other difference is the presence of extra conductors in the cable, which cannot be seen without very close inspection. True telephone RJ-45 connectors are a special variant of 8P2C, meaning only the middle 2 positions have conductors in them, while pins 7 and 8 are shorting a programming resistor. Computer RJ-45 is 8P8C, with all eight conductors present.

USB 2.0:

Released in April 2000. Added higher maximum bandwidth of 480 Mbit/s (now called "Hi-Speed"). USB is intended to help retire all legacy varieties of serial and parallel ports. USB can connect computer peripherals such as mouse devices, keyboards, PDAs, gamepads and joysticks, scanners, digital cameras, printers, personal media players, and flash drives. For many of those devices USB has become the standard connection method. USB is also used extensively to connect non-networked printers; USB simplifies connecting several printers to one computer. USB was originally designed for personal computers, but it has become commonplace on other devices such as PDAs and video game consoles. In 2004, there were about 1 billion USB devices in the world. The design of USB is standardized by the USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF), an industry standards body incorporating leading companies from the computer and electronics industries. Notable members have included Apple Inc., Hewlett-Packard, NEC, Microsoft, Intel, and Agere.

Red Hat:

Red Hat Linux introduced a graphical installer called Anaconda, intended to be easy to use for novices, and which has since been adopted by some other Linux distributions. It also introduced a built-in tool called Lokkit for configuring the firewall capabilities. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is released in server versions for x86, x86-64, Itanium, PowerPC and IBM System z, and desktop versions for x86 and x86-64.

SATA/IDE:

Serial ATA (SATA) is a computer bus interface for connecting host bus adapters to mass storage devices such as hard disk drives and optical drives. Serial ATA was designed to replace the older ATA (AT Attachment) standard (also known as EIDE). It is able to use the same low level commands, but serial ATA host-adapters and devices communicate via a high-speed serial cable over two pairs of conductors. SATA offers several compelling advantages over the older parallel ATA (PATA) interface: reduced cable-bulk and cost (reduced from 80 wires to seven), faster and more efficient data transfer, and hot swapping. The SATA host adapter is integrated into almost all modern consumer laptop computers and desktop motherboards.

IDE (Integrated Drive Electronics) is a standard electronic interface used between a computer motherboard's data paths or bus and the computer's disk storage devices. The IDE interface is based on the IBM PC Industry Standard Architecture (ISA) 16-bit bus standard, but it is also used in computers that use other bus standards. Most computers sold today use an enhanced version of IDE called Enhanced Integrated Drive Electronics (EIDE). In today's computers, the IDE controller is often built into the motherboard.