Diamond Systems ELTON NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier Industrial Carrier Boards with Data Acquisition

Teams moving a PC/104-based system to GPU computing often face a choice between a new custom board and losing the I/O cards they already trust. The Diamond Systems ELTON series is a family of industrial carrier boards that puts the NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier on a board with a PCI/104-Express expansion option, so standard PC/104 I/O modules can sit on a Jetson. Diamond Systems quotes 1G and 10G Ethernet, video capture, display, analog, digital, serial and motion control among the PCIe/104 modules available from many manufacturers.

The AGX Xavier delivers up to 32 TOPS from a 512-core Volta GPU with Tensor Cores, with 10, 15 and 30 W power modes. Around it, every ELTON board carries two Gigabit Ethernet ports, two USB 3.1 and two USB 2.0 ports, HDMI and LVDS, audio, four software-configurable RS-232/422/485 ports and two 1 Mbps CAN ports. A SAM data acquisition circuit adds six 12-bit A/D inputs at up to 1 MSPS, two 12-bit D/A outputs and 13 GPIO lines, with Diamond’s C library and a GUI control panel for logging. Sockets cover a camera module connector, UFS flash, M.2 2242 PCIe x4 NVMe, Mini PCIe and a NimbeLink Skywire cellular modem.

The range has three carriers, all supplied without a module and differing only in stack expansion. The ELT-BB01 has a 3-bank PCIe/104 Type 1 connector with one PCIe x8 and four PCIe x1 links. The ELT-BB02 adds a PCI-104 connector through a PCIe-to-PCI bridge, so older PCI cards can share the stack. The ELT-BB03 has no stack connector and suits builds that use only the on-board and socketed I/O.

Diamond Systems rates the ELTON industrial carrier boards from -40 to +85 °C on the datasheet, with a 9-20 V DC input; a jumper lets the board take +12 V from a PCIe/104 or PCI-104 power supply card instead, and a connector for an external battery backs up the real-time clock. Almost every connector latches to hold up under vibration, and the ACC-HSELT-01 heat spreader doubles as a mounting plate for conduction cooling. ELTON suits industrial automation, transport and robotics systems that pair AGX Xavier inference with analog, serial and CAN I/O.