UP board: improved I/O Interfaces on the Intel Atom X5 board for professional makers

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The UP board is intended to provide makers with cutting edge, Intel Atom x5 technology and in addition to enable a quick and seamless integration of that technology in makers existing and new projects and ecosystem designs.

The UP board is a truly revolutionary product, opening a completely new set of applications for professional makers where advanced processing capabilities of the new Intel Atom X5 processor are needed for next generation multimedia, gaming, miniPC, micro-server, embedded and robotics solutions.

All advanced computing features and simple connection interfaces are made available through standard Linux, Windows and Android APIs which will be regularly improved and supported by the UP community.

40-pin-Expansion-Interface: The UP board can be integrated with many existing projects as it provides a versatile 40-pin expansion interface. As it is intended for professional makers, we decided to improve the original 40-pin interface by integrating an Altera MAX V CPLD (output DC-current up to 170mA) and an ADC (8bit/189KSPS) thereby easily enabling a new series of mixed analog/digital applications.

The MAX V CPLD enables “breadboard-friendly” GPIO features. The MAX V CPLD GPIOs can be re-programmed to change: GPIO-driver strength, slew-rate (fast/slow), Schmitt trigger, internal Pull-Up and internal Clamp-diode. An additional feature is that the MAX V CPLD can be re-programmed to integrate “ad-hoc” Finite-State-Machines having faster responses by reducing latency of OS/drivers.

In addition to the 40-pin-Expansion-Connector, the UP board has introduced additional hi-speed I/Os enabling the seamless integration of a complex ASSP requiring high data bandwidth.

Those interfaces include: 2 x USB2 ports (2 ports over HUB/ 480Mbps total) and 1x UART port on a small 10 micro-pin header, one SDIO port on the standard 40-pin header (currently under evaluation). Such additional resources provides the needed data bandwidth and interface to easily develop UP Expansion Modules supporting UMTS, 3G/4G, WiFi, BT and Storage.