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October 17
E
mbEddEd
C
omputing
hardware platforms based on congatec hard-
ware. For this purpose, real-time hardware
virtualization is also supported. Existing solu-
tions include the IoT gateways from Techna-
gon, iesy, EXPEMB and congatec.
The IoT gateway from Technagon featuring the
new Intel Atom Celeron or Pentium processors
is based on the latest SMARC 2.0 standard and
uses the new SGET eNUC standard for a stan-
dardized box PC design. Despite its small foot-
print of only 104 x 104mm, it supports up to
three radio standards with up to six antennas.
In order to meet the different requirements in
the industrial environment, the box PC is avail-
able in numerous housing variants for wall,
DIN rail or Vesa mounting as well as in an IP54
protected outdoor version.
The IoT gateway from iesy is also based on
the eNUC standard for the carrier board
and housing. Under the hood, Qseven Com-
puter-on-Modules are used. These come
either with ARM or x68 technology. The
entire range of current technologies is avail-
able, from modules featuring the particularly
energy-efficient i.MX6 ARM processors, or
the graphics-rich AMD Embedded G-Se-
ries APUs, to the latest Intel Atom processors.
This allows OEMs to scale their gateway for
the widest range of varying software, perfor-
mance and cost requirements. The interface
offer includes the standard industrial set com-
prising 4x serial UART interfaces, RS232, 2x
TTL as well as 3x USB and 2x GbE, and is
suited for the connection of existing, mostly
wired installations.
The FlexGate gateway from EXPEMB is also
based on Qseven modules, but with IoT con-
nectivity that has been specially developed for
the Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) protocol
LoRa. It connects up to 62,500 smart LoRa
sensors and devices, providing 1 Gbit Eth-
ernet, WLAN, 3G/4G or Bluetooth for com-
munication with the central cloud. All these
connections are available at the same time
on the gateway and if a connection fails, an
individual fallback can be defined with differ-
ent scripts. A wide range of I/Os for interfac-
Figure 2. Standardized and freely programmable IoT APIs make OEMs independent from specific
manufacturers or hardware. Four IoT gateways, which are suitable for use with the new Cloud
API for IoT Gateways, come from congatec, Technagon, iesy and EXPEMB (from left to right).
Figure 3. It is necessary to establish additional standardization of APIs and design-ins beyond the
core standards in order to further simplify the development of custom-specific applications based
on standardized embedded computing building blocks.
