Diamond Systems DS-MPE-SER4M Rugged High-Speed 4-Port Serial mPCIe Card with Latching Connectors

A small embedded host can run short of serial ports, and the only free expansion may be a PCIe MiniCard socket. The DS-MPE-SER4M fills that socket with four high-speed RS-232/422/485 serial ports, built by Diamond Systems for embedded and OEM equipment in vehicles and outdoor installations where temperature swings are wide.

The card uses 16550-compatible UARTs with 256-byte transmit and receive FIFOs and SP336 multi-mode transceivers. Data rates reach 1 Mbps in RS-232 mode and 10 Mbps in RS-422 and RS-485 modes on every port. Because it sits in the full-size MiniCard socket, the DS-MPE-SER4M adds serial ports without taking a position in a PC/104 or PCIe/104 stack.

Each of the four ports is set for RS-232, RS-422 or RS-485 by jumpers, or selected programmatically through GPIO lines built into the UART. Every port has ±15 kV ESD protection, and the signals leave on two miniature latching connectors, two ports per connector. The CK-SER4M cable kit with two dual DB9 male cables is included, along with a hardware kit of jumpers and mounting screws. The DS-MPE-OPT4232 offers four opto-isolated RS-232 ports in the same form factor, and the DS-MPE-OPT4M22 mixes isolated RS-232 and RS-485.

Power is 3.3 V DC at 0.462 W from the MiniCard socket. The DS-MPE-SER4M operates from -40 to 85 °C at 5 to 95% humidity, non-condensing, and Diamond Systems can custom-configure it with 0 ohm resistors in place of jumper blocks for high-vibration environments. Drivers cover Windows XP and Linux 2.6 kernels, and the card is RoHS compliant.