Diamond Systems E104-MPE-02 Wide Temperature PCI/104-Express Dual PCIe MiniCard Carrier Board with SIM and mSATA Support

A host board’s own MiniCard socket is often taken by the first I/O module, leaving nowhere for a modem or local storage. The E104-MPE-02 is the dual-socket build in the Diamond Systems E104-MPE series, a PCI/104-Express carrier board that adds two PCIe MiniCard sockets to a PCIe/104 stack at wide temperature.

Both sockets on the E104-MPE-02 take full-size cards, and socket 1 also takes half-size cards. One SIM socket serves socket 1, so a cellular modem can share the board with an mSATA SSD or an I/O card in socket 2. A PCIe switch and a USB 2.0 hub fan the single host PCIe lane and USB link out to the sockets, so every socket has PCIe x1 and USB 2.0, and the upstream link can come from the top or bottom PCIe/104 connector. Socket 2 also takes an mSATA SSD of up to 64GB through an on-board PCIe-to-SATA converter, detected automatically. The PCI-104 connector passes signals through the stack.

LEDs show activity per socket, including WWAN, WPAN and WLAN, and a jumper block disables the wireless function on each socket. Diamond’s own MiniCards fit the sockets, such as the DS-MPE-DAQ0804 analogue I/O module and the DS-MPE-GPIO digital I/O module, and the E104-MPE-04 doubles the socket count with a second SIM socket where more modules are needed.

Power is 5 V DC from the PCIe/104 bus. The E104-MPE-02 operates from -40 to +85 °C at 5 to 95% non-condensing humidity, and Diamond states compatibility with MIL-STD-202G for 50G shock and 11.95G random vibration. Conformal coating is available as a customisation, the board ships with a mounting hardware kit and it is RoHS compliant.