infoTECH Feature

April 08, 2009

Portwell, LynuxWorks, Intel Work On Low-Cost Solutions

By Vivek Naik
American Portwell Technology and LynuxWorks reportedly have combined their technologies with Intel’s Atom processor series to bring the healthcare industry, government IT technology departments, and the military a low cost, small footprint open embedded solution for networking and other systems.
 
“By combining the power of LynuxWorks’ BlueCat and Intel’s (News - Alert) new Atom processor family with our PEB-2737 embedded computer board, we are able to provide our customers in such industries as industrial control, test and measurement, medical, government and military, with a low power, fanless and compact embedded computing solution with an open standards based embedded operating system,” said Cliff Moon, vice president of sales and marketing at Portwell.
 
The company’s PEB-2737, shown below, embedded architecture is a 3.5-inch Compact eXtended form factor printed circuit board that’s in line with Intel’s standards for the Atom processor Z series central processing units and the Intel System Controller Hub US15W chipset with audio, Gigabit large area network, dual display, Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA), universal serial bus and secure digital input and output provisions. It supports DDR2 SDRAM 1GB and has one IDE and 2 SATA connectors.
 
The Intel’s Atom is a single core, micro-architecture processor, as reported by TMCnet, with 2.0 Watt or 2.2 Watt thermal design power design options that encourage fanless and low-cost hardware designs for mobile internet devices, in-vehicle infotainment, medical, retail, transaction solutions, kiosks, point-of-service terminals, gaming, industrial control and automation. It embeds 47 million transistors on a single chip measuring less than 26mm square.
 
LynuxWorks’ BluCat Linux 5.6 operating system is well suited for Portwell’s PEB-2737 since it is lean and compact and functions smoothly, TMCnet reported, in thermally demanding environments where variations are as low as 40 degrees C below zero to as high as 85 degrees C above, and it being considered very seriously by the military as a money saving option when compared with current costly proprietary OS’s.
 
“Supporting the Atom processor based embedded computer board from Portwell provides an optimized open standards embedded solution in a form factor designed to address the performance, low-power, and network needs for connected portable devices in the Medical and Mil/Aero markets,” said George Brooks, director of business development at LynuxWorks.
 
Don’t forget to check out TMCnet’s White Paper Library, which provides a selection of in-depth information on relevant topics affecting the IP Communications industry. The library offers white papers, case studies and other documents which are free to registered users.

Vivek Naik is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Vivek's articles, please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Michael Dinan
FOLLOW US

Subscribe to InfoTECH Spotlight eNews

InfoTECH Spotlight eNews delivers the latest news impacting technology in the IT industry each week. Sign up to receive FREE breaking news today!
FREE eNewsletter

infoTECH Whitepapers