E²Brain Interest Group founded

The aim of the E²Brain Interest Group (IG) is the joint development and marketing of RISC-based COMs designed around E²Brain – the recently published COM standard from Kontron. The creation of this interest group reinforces E²Brain’s claims as a new standard.

Users will benefit in particular from an expanded range of services for E²Brain and a greater range of RISC-COM products. By mid-2006, membership of the E²Brain Industrial Group should have reached approx. 15 companies – it is not only COM manufacturers, but also COM integrators and OEMs that are invited to join the E²Brain Interest Group. For more information on the E²Brain Interest Group, see www.e2brain-ig.com
Further E²Brain boards will be developed and brought to market at a rapid pace. In order to ensure uniform global development of the E²Brain standards, the founding members considered it necessary to found a public E²Brain consortium.
Current reference designs show how seriously the founding members take the further development of E²Brain, with these designs not just coming from Kontron: MAZeT recently launched the E²Brain-compliant MEB 5200 development platform with MPC5200 from Freescale as a compact communication centre. In addition to standard PC interfaces such as PCI, IDE, USB and 10/100 Mbit Ethernet, industrial standards such as CAN, I2C or SPI are also available as interfaces for the direct connection of required peripherals. The user-friendly bootloader Uboot makes it possible to start up the preferred embedded Linux on this platform. MAZeT develops customer-specific embedded computing platform on the basis of this platform.
Frank Reklies, Technical Head of Hard- and Software Development at MAZeT summarises as follows: “This platform serves as the starting-point for customer-specific developments that require high-performance processors with numerous interfaces and a high level of integration. This applies to all mobile applications, as well as applications in the automotive or mechanical engineering sectors.”
At the end of the first half of 2006, MAZeT will begin the mass supply of two customer-modified versions of the MEB5200. Other customer projects are currently in the development phase.

Ultratronik will soon be offering an E²Brain called UMC-AU1550 with AMD Au1550 and an integrated security engine from SafeNet, while Odyssee sees its own strengths in customer-specific designs. For example, as a specialist for rugged designs, Odyssee recently re-designed Kontron’s EB8540/41 as an internal communication facility for a submarine. UniControlls’ strength lies in the development of industrial controls and rail traffic technology.
The combination of the E²Brain Interest Group founding members should send a signal to OEMs: the members of the interest group offer full service, second source as needed and a broadly diversified E²Brain portfolio. Although there were just six E²Brain COMs at the time the standard was published, today there are already eight and by Embedded World, there should be twelve E²Brain COMs available. This means the E²Brain Interest Group also fulfils ‘seismographic’ functions for state-of-the-art processors in the embedded RISC technology field.
The new E²Brain open computer-on module standard offers an economic option for cost-sensitive embedded computer applications, an area previously dominated by proprietary designs. The use of exchangeable and scalable standard modules offers system integrators a considerably reduced time to market. Until now, these advantages have been limited to developments with x86 technology, but with the E²Brain standard, they are now also available to RISC-based applications. In general, E²Brain modules stand out because of their high processing and communication performance with low energy requirements and an extended temperature range. E²Brain specifications can be downloaded from http://www.e2brain-ig.com .