Diamond Systems E104-MPE

PCIe MiniCards are a small, standard way to add serial, CAN, Ethernet, data acquisition, storage or wireless to an embedded system, but most host boards have only one socket, and it is often taken by the first module a design needs. The Diamond Systems E104-MPE series solves that in a PCIe/104 stack with PCI/104-Express carrier boards that add two or four MiniCard sockets on a single level, designed for rugged applications.

Every E104-MPE board takes one PCIe lane and a USB link from the host and fans them out through a PCIe switch and a USB 2.0 hub, so each socket has PCIe x1 and USB 2.0. The upstream link can come from the top or bottom PCIe/104 connector, and a PCI-104 connector passes signals through for stacks that mix both buses. Socket 2 also takes an mSATA SSD of up to 64GB through an on-board PCIe-to-SATA converter, detected automatically. Per-socket LEDs show WWAN, WPAN and WLAN activity, and a jumper block disables the wireless function on each socket.

The series has two models. The E104-MPE-04 has four full-size sockets, two of which also take half-size cards, and two SIM sockets serving sockets 1 and 4, so two cellular modems can run in one stack. The E104-MPE-02 has two sockets, one SIM socket and one socket that takes half-size cards, for designs that need a modem beside storage or one extra I/O card. Diamond lists its own MiniCards as compatible. The DS-MPE range we supply covers Gigabit Ethernet, four-port serial with or without optoisolation, dual CAN, analog I/O and digital I/O, so a single E104-MPE can turn a PCIe/104 SBC into a complete I/O stack without a second carrier level.

Both E104-MPE boards take 5 V DC from the PCIe/104 bus and operate from -40 to +85 °C at 5 to 95% non-condensing humidity. Diamond states compatibility with MIL-STD-202G for 50G shock and 11.95G random vibration, offers conformal coating as a customization and includes a mounting hardware kit. The boards are RoHS compliant. Typical E104-MPE installations include vehicle computers, defense electronics, remote monitoring stations with cellular links and industrial control stacks, where an extra modem, storage or I/O module has to join an existing PCIe/104 stack.