A custom motherboard with 4-axis motion control and 32 optically isolated discrete I/O points uses an off-the-shelf PC104 format processor with performance to the Pentium level.

A PC104 processor is embedded in several varieties of medical monitors. Display and I/O boards are custom while the processor is off-the-shelf. The processor is upgradable from 286 level through Pentium level.

The PC104 standard and hundreds of off-the-shelf products provide a way to develop a sophisticated system with minimum custom development.

Disk controllers, VGA graphics controllers, and various other I/O and processor options can be "stacked up" on top of target custom hardware to provide a familiar DOS compatible development environment for embedded real-time applications.

 

The PC104 standard gives OEM product developers access to DOS/Windows software and PC compatibility, but in a ruggedized and compact form factor. A complete Pentium based PC-compatible system can consist of one or two circuit boards measuring roughly 4 inches square. The development environment can be any PC compatible system, including standard Microsoft or Borland C/C++ compilers. Upon completion of development, the application can be programmed into EPROM's that are made to look like disk drives during operation. A standard DOS batch file is executed from EPROM upon bootup. Battery backed RAM can even be used to emulate writable "disk drives" using standard DOS file functions.

PC104 is electrically equivalent to the ISA standard, but on a smaller form factor. J. Gordon Electronic Design has designed the PC104 standard into both medical and industrial equipment. We were instrumental in the implementation of multiple medical monitoring devices, providing both hardware and software development. We also designed a specialized motherboard for the food packaging industry... believe it or not, just putting a candy bar in its wrapper requires a tightly synchronized 4-axis motion controller!