PHOENIX, 21 Jan. 2014. “We are in the middle of an IT paradigm shift,” describes Matthias Huber, vice president of marketing and technologist, ADLINK Technology. Wireless handhelds, including smartphones, are generating greater demand for compact, high-performance embedded solutions.
Since 1992, definitions (PC/104, ETX, Com Express, and more) have centered around the x86 chipset. Yet, the advent of ARM enabled incredible horsepower on small handhelds; people had so much horsepower in their hands they didn’t know what to do with it all, he says. Driving forces include: evolution of device interfaces, increasing I/O density on processors, trend to system on chip (SoC), and chips are under 10 watts.
The SMARC open standard is a Kontron/Adlink initiative, held by the Standardization Group for Embedded Technologies (SGET). SMARC is described as “a new card edge format for ARM and SoC.”
“Now technology is an open choice: Android and Linux on ARM or Intel,” he concludes. “It is truly up to the users to decide.”
