Tag Archives: hardware

Tiny (Mother)Board for DIMM-PC®/520-IE Part I

A few years ago a fellow worker and I started to work on an education platform for students to familiarize themselves with embedded /low resource systems.

We decided to take a DIMM-PC®/520-IE with AMD® Elan™ SC520 (133MHz) CPU from Kontron.

The Core used for the AMD Elan is a 5×86 processor. This processor is an x86-compatible CPU which was introduced in 1995 by AMD for use in 486-class computer systems.

Due to the internally-set multiplier of 4, the core runs at 133 MHz. The combination of the relatively large 16 KB  write-back L1 cache and 133 MHz clock speed allows the 5×86 to perform >= an Intel Pentium 75 MHz processor in integer arithmetic performance.

 

 

 

The Elan CPU comes with following architecture.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And last but not least the full feature list of our DIMM-PC

CPU AMD® Elan™ SC520 133MHz
Cache 16 kByte Write-Back L1
Common Features JIDA Support, I²C Bus, Programmable / CS Output, Support for alphanumerical displays
Dimensions (H x W x D) 68 x 40 mm (2.7 x 1.6“)
Ethernet 10/100 MBit Ethernet
Flash Disk IDE compatible Flash Disk up to 32 MByte on board
Hard Disk IDE Hard Disk Interface on external device
Humidity Operation: 10% to 90%
Storage: 5% to 95%, (non condensing)
Interface Floppy Interface single drive
JRC / JIDA32 JRC remote control via COM
Keyboard Keyboard Controller integrated with chipset
Main Memory Up to 32 MByte DRAM on board
Operating System Preinstalled DR-DOS®, lol 🙂
Parallel Port 1 x LPT1, EPP support
Power Consumption 2 Watt @ 5V only
Power Supply 5V
Real Time Clock Integrated with chipset
Serial 2 x Serial TTL (16550 compatible)
Special Features EEPROM for CMOS Setup
USB Optional 1x USB 1.1 OHCI
Watchdog Watchdog

Our aim was to build an education system to show our students how PC systems are working and how easy it is to build a Linux OS from scratch for this kind of architecture. Secondly we want also to have a small development platform for third party projects.

With 32MB of DRAM and up to 32MB of IDE compatible hard drive and full featured I/O interfaces like serial port, LPT, IDE interface, Watchdog Timer, I²C Interface, General Purpose Chip Select and last but not least a beautiful Ethernet Interface suit all our needs for an easy to handle development platform.