DFI AL551-BN-E3940 Quad-Core Intel Atom x5-E3940 3.5″ Industrial Motherboard with Dual GbE and Triple Display

An operator station on a packaging or assembly machine sits inside an enclosed panel where every watt of heat has to leave through the enclosure walls. The AL551-BN-E3940 is the quad-core Atom x5-E3940 build in the DFI AL551 series of 3.5″ industrial motherboards, giving four cores within a 9.5 W TDP, below the 12 W of the x7-E3950 build.

The Intel Atom x5-E3940 (Apollo Lake) runs four cores at 1.6 GHz, bursting to 1.8 GHz, which suits an HMI runtime alongside data collection. One DDR3L 1866 MHz SO-DIMM slot takes up to 8 GB. Intel HD Graphics drives three displays at once: dual-channel 48-bit LVDS at up to 1920 x 1200 for the built-in panel, DP++ at up to 4096 x 2160 at 60 Hz and VGA at up to 2048 x 1536 for a second screen or an older monitor.

Two GbE ports on Intel I210AT controllers link the machine network and the plant or MES network. Two RS-232/422/485 COM ports and an 8-bit DIO connect drives, scanners and stack lights. USB is two USB 3.1 Gen 1 and two USB 2.0 Type-A ports and two USB 2.0 on headers. An M.2 B-key (2242) with PCIe, USB 2.0 and SATA takes an SSD, a full-size Mini PCIe socket takes Wi-Fi and one SATA port adds a drive.

The AL551-BN-E3940 runs from 12 V DC on a 4-pin or barrel connector, cooled by a fanless heatsink, and operates from 0 to 60 °C. It carries CE, FCC, UKCA and RoHS compliance, firmware TPM 2.0, a watchdog timer and support for Windows 10 IoT Enterprise and Linux. AL551-BN-E3950 adds TDP headroom for heavier graphics, and AL551-BN-E3930 halves the core count for simpler panels.