DFI M8MP553-ECC-81QDI NXP i.MX 8M Plus Quad 3.5″ Embedded Board with 9 to 36 V DC Input, 8GB LPDDR4 Memory and Wide Temperature

Edge gateways that buffer days of readings, run several protocol services in containers or serve a browser-based dashboard tend to run out of memory before they run out of CPU. The M8MP553-ECC-81QDI answers that with 8 GB of LPDDR4, the most in the DFI M8MP553 series, on a 3.5″ embedded board rated from -30 to 80 °C.

The industrial-grade quad-core NXP i.MX 8M Plus runs four Arm cores at 1.6 GHz. Storage is 16 GB of eMMC 5.1 with a microSD slot for logs that leave the site on a card. The Vivante GC7000UL GPU drives HDMI at 1920 x 1080 and dual-channel LVDS at 1920 x 1200 at the same time, and the video engine encodes and decodes H.265 and H.264 at 1080p60. Linux Yocto 5.0 is the default image, with Debian 12 and Android 10 on request.

For a gateway, the I/O count matters: two GbE ports on AR8035 PHYs, two CAN 2.0B ports, an RS-232 header, an RS-232/422/485 header and a two-wire RS-485 terminal block on the rear, plus 8-bit DIO. Two USB 3.1 Gen 1 and two USB 2.0 Type-A ports and two internal USB 2.0 headers connect peripherals. An M.2 B-key socket with a nano SIM slot takes a 4G modem for remote sites, an M.2 E-key 2230 socket takes Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, and a Micro USB download port serves as a service port for flashing.

The M8MP553-ECC-81QDI is fanless and runs from 9 to 36 V DC on a terminal block, with the full temperature range rated at 9 to 24 V and 36 V supported up to 70 °C. A programmable watchdog recovers a stalled application, and the board carries CE, FCC, UKCA and RoHS compliance. The M8MP553-ECC-41QDI offers the same quad-core build with 4 GB, and the M8MP553-ECC-21DLI is the dual-core option with the 2.3 TOPS NPU.