Diamond Systems E104-MPE-04 Rugged PCI/104-Express Quad PCIe MiniCard Carrier Board with Dual SIM and mSATA Support

Rugged stacks often need more MiniCard I/O than the host board offers, whether that is extra serial, CAN, Ethernet or a pair of cellular modems. The E104-MPE-04 is the quad-socket build in the Diamond Systems E104-MPE series, a PCI/104-Express carrier board that adds four PCIe MiniCard sockets to a PCIe/104 stack.

All four sockets on the E104-MPE-04 take full-size cards, and two of them also take half-size cards, with spacers for both in the hardware kit. Two SIM sockets on the underside serve sockets 1 and 4, so two cellular modules can run side by side. 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.

Per-socket LEDs show WWAN, WPAN and WLAN activity, with SATA activity LEDs, and a jumper block disables the wireless function on each socket. Diamond lists its own MiniCards as compatible, including the DS-MPE-GE210 Gigabit Ethernet module and the DS-MPE-SER4M four-port serial module, along with the DS-MPE-SER4OPT optoisolated serial modules. The E104-MPE-02 is the dual-socket build for smaller requirements.

Power is 5 V DC from the PCIe/104 bus. The E104-MPE-04 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 for harsher environments, a mounting hardware kit is included and the board is RoHS compliant.