Diamond Systems JACKSON NVIDIA Jetson Orin NX and Orin Nano Small Form Factor Carrier Boards

Moving an Orin NX or Orin Nano design from a developer kit to production usually raises the question of a custom carrier board, and the cost and time that brings. The Diamond Systems JACKSON series is a small form factor carrier board for the NVIDIA Jetson Orin NX and Orin Nano that brings every module interface out to a connector or socket, and leaves custom I/O to a small daughterboard instead.

That daughterboard connector is the main design decision behind the JACKSON boards. A flex cable carries PCIe, USB 3.0, I2C and power to a board mounted underneath, which can add Ethernet ports, an Ethernet switch, USB ports or a PoE PD circuit; the second GbE port shares a PCIe lane with this connector, so a design uses one or the other. Storage runs to an M.2 M-key 2280 or 2242 NVMe socket on four PCIe lanes, which the Orin NX and Orin Nano need because they have no eMMC, with a full-size minicard socket with SIM and an M.2 E-key 2230 socket for modem, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth modules.

The range has four models on the same board. The JAX-BB01 is the carrier without a module. The JAX-ASY-ONX16 and JAX-ASY-ONX8 ship with the Orin NX 16GB and 8GB, at 100 and 70 TOPS, and the JAX-ASY-ONA8 ships with the Orin Nano 8GB at 40 TOPS. Each assembly comes with the module installed and programmed with a JetPack-based Linux image, a fan sink and a 128GB NVMe SSD. The carrier and its I/O are identical across the range, so a design can move between modules as the workload becomes clear.

Every JACKSON board has two GbE ports on RJ-45, three USB 3.2 and one USB 2.0 ports, HDMI 2.0a/b with audio, one RS-232/485 and one RS-232 port, one CAN 2.0 port and 16 GPIO at 3.3 or 5 V. Two 4-lane MIPI CSI-2 connectors take cameras through Diamond adapter boards for e-con Systems and Allied Vision. The boards take 7-20 V DC, supply the Orin Nano its 5 V through on-board load switches and are rated from -25 to +80 °C, matching the Orin modules. These small form factor carrier boards suit robotics, machine vision, mobile equipment and small edge AI enclosures.