6
November 2015
B
oards
& M
odules
embedded NUC with Qseven modules
brings two SGET standards together
By Christian Eder,
congatec
and
Ansgar Hein,
ies - intelligent embedded systems
Embedded NUC is the new form
factor standard from SGET for both
boards and system designs. When
combined with Qseven, modular Box
PC designs can be created which,
despite their highly individual
interface options on the module and
the board as well as on the system,
are all SGET standard-based.
Initially, the NUC (Next Unit of Comput-
ing) form factor was introduced by Intel in
2012 addressing commercial applications. The
SGET (Standardization Group for Embedded
Technologies e.V.) adapted this form factor to
suit the requirements of embedded and IoT
applications and published the official 1.0 ver-
sion of the embedded NUC specification at
the beginning of 2015. Essentially, it defines
an embedded form factor, which uses the 4
x 4 inch format (101.6mmx101.6mm) of the
commercial NUC form factor and turns it
into an industrial-grade as well as processor
vendor-independent version. A system design
specification is currently in the pipeline.
The extension of the commercial NUC speci-
fication basically adds extra mounting holes, a
recommended long-term availability of at least
five years and a cooling solution for fanless
designs in completely sealed cases. The exact
definition of the position of the external inter-
faces on the board and two fundamental types
of interfaces:
Type 1 boards have at least 1 LAN and two USB
interfaces in the leanest configuration; Type 2
boards are equipped with a further LAN inter-
face as well as 2x UART/COM ports and a PCI
Express slot for Mini-PCIe or mSATA exten-
sions. This makes embedded NUC suitable for
headless systems, which are designed without
graphics support as pure control systems or
IoT gateways. For both variants, however, addi-
tional interfaces are also recommended such
as two further USB ports, 1x SATA, 1x SD/
mSD socket, 1x Video Out (HDMI, DP, RGB,
LVDS) and 1x audio. Designers therefore can
work with clear guidelines to provide standard
feature sets for embedded NUC systems. To
enable this, 88mm wide interface mounting
areas on both the front and rear part of the
board are available. Basically, on the embedded
NUC boards any external interface required by
the application can be supported, such as CAN
(native support by Intel Atom processors) or
MIPI-CSI (native support by some Intel Pen-
tium and Celeron processors and by a range of
ARM processors).
To some extent, individual interface custom-
ization can therefore be considered part of
the embedded NUC standard, thus enabling
space-saving applications. These range from
simple serial interface integration for legacy
applications, through IoT gateways and sys-
tems on processing level with field connection,
up to fanless 15 watt Panel PCs with extremely
high-performance SoC graphics. Designers
can take two different courses when developing
industrial-grade NUC systems. They can either
develop new boards from scratch with the
desired features or they can build an embedded
NUC-compliant carrier board for the required
feature set and deploy Computer-on-Modules
as a computing core. This way, there is no need
to implement the processing core on every
board, but it can be integrated, for example, via
separately purchased Qseven modules.
Apart from considerably less work in terms
of development and testing of the individual
embedded NUC boards, thanks to the mod-
ule scalability customers benefit from the easy
adaptation of existing NUC carrier boards to
meet custom-specific needs. On top of this,
the solution presents an interesting economic
aspect for future updates, for example, when
migrating from the Intel Atom E3800 proces-
sor family platform (codenamed Bay Trail) to
Intel Pentium and Celeron processors (code-
named Braswell).
Qseven modules in particular offer extreme
flexibility due to a host of different variants,
from Intel Pentium, Celeron and Atom designs
to AMD Embedded G-Series and µQseven
modules with ARM Cortex A9-based Freescale
i.MX 6 processors, plus they are future-proof.
As embedded NUC has been derived from
the Intel NUC designs, currently the market is
experiencing a particularly large rise in demand
for embedded NUC designs with x86 proces-
sor technology. These designs are deployed in
applications, where commercial NUC variants
fail to meet requirements in terms of robustness,
noise immunity or 24/7 continuous operation,
