Diamond Systems GPIO-MM-12-XT 64-Channel GPIO Digital I/O + 10 Counter/Timer PC/104 Module

New PC/104 designs that need counting, timing and general digital lines can carry them on one board rather than two. The GPIO-MM-12-XT is the ABC/DEF build in the GPIO-MM-XT series, an FPGA-based PC/104 digital I/O module with 64 GPIO and ten 16-bit counter/timers, with its 8255 ports laid out in sequential ABC/DEF order.

A Xilinx Spartan II FPGA with 200,000 gates holds the personality, loading it from on-board flash at power-up, and new code can be downloaded over a JTAG cable. Two 9513 counter/timer cores provide five 16-bit counters each, with programmable input sources, output waveforms, up or down counting, one-shot or continuous operation and PWM. Counters cascade to 32 bits or wider, and the 40 MHz clock gives fine resolution for pulse generation, frequency measurement and event counting.

The I/O is 48 programmable lines on 8255 cores plus eight fixed inputs and eight fixed outputs, spread over three connectors with 100 pins in total. One connector has ESD protection and the other high-drive buffers that sink up to 64 mA per line, with jumper-set pull-up or pull-down resistors, and every line starts as an input at power-up. The GPIO-MM-XT offers the same features in ACB/DFE order with QMM-10 and GMM-48 register compatibility, and the GPIO-MM-21-XT gives 96 digital lines without counters.

The GPIO-MM-12-XT runs on +5 V and operates from -40 to 85 °C. It stacks on the 16-bit PC/104 ISA bus of Diamond hosts such as the ARIES and HELIX SBCs, with two programmable interrupts, a 256-byte EEPROM and eight diagnostic LEDs showing the loaded personality. Diamond’s free Universal Driver software covers the digital I/O and counter functions.