DFI QCS051 Qualcomm Dragonwing QCS6490 and QCS5430 2.5" Pico-ITX SBCs with 128GB UFS and CAN FD

Mobile robots, smart cameras and slim edge devices leave little room for a board and little power to feed it. The DFI QCS051 series fits that brief with Qualcomm Dragonwing Arm processors on a 2.5″ Pico-ITX board measuring 100 x 72 mm, running from a 5 V DC supply. DFI aims the series at autonomous mobile robots (AMRs), box computers and thin clients, where an Arm system on chip with a built-in AI engine can take the place of a larger board and a separate accelerator.

Every QCS051 board pairs its processor with soldered LPDDR5x memory, 128 GB of UFS 3.1 storage and a microSD 3.0 slot, so there is no SO-DIMM to work loose under vibration. Graphics come from the Qualcomm Adreno 643L GPU with OpenGL ES 3.2, driving one HDMI 1.4 output at 1080p under Linux. Two four-lane MIPI CSI-2 connectors take cameras directly, which suits vision tasks running on the AI engine. Linux Yocto 4.0 with kernel 6.6 is the default image, with Ubuntu 20.04 available on request.

Three builds make up the range. The QCS051-BCC-4890 carries the eight-core Qualcomm QCS6490 at up to 2.7 GHz with 12 TOPS (INT8) and 4 GB of memory, rated from 0 to 60 °C. The QCS051-ECC-8890 uses the same QCS6490 with 8 GB of memory and a -25 to 75 °C operating range for unheated enclosures and outdoor equipment. The QCS051-BCC-4830 steps down to the six-core QCS5430 at up to 2.1 GHz with 3.5 TOPS and 4 GB, for designs where lighter AI work is enough.

The I/O is aimed at machines rather than desktops. A GbE port on an ASIX AX88179A controller, two USB 3.1 Gen 1 Type-A ports and three internal USB 2.0 headers handle networking and peripherals, while an RS-232 header, a CAN FD port and 8-bit DIO connect motor controllers, sensors and field signals. An M.2 B-key 3052 socket with a nano SIM slot takes a 4G or 5G module, and an M.2 E-key 2230 socket takes Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. A Type-C download port and a Micro USB debug port serve as service ports for flashing and debugging.

QCS051 boards run fanless with a heat spreader, and DFI lists a heatsink for both temperature grades. Typical consumption with the QCS6490 is 3 W at 5 V, with a 7.25 W maximum. The series carries CE, FCC, UKCA and RoHS compliance.