PICMG Announces New COM-HPC Carrier Board Design Guide
February 18, 2022
News
PICMG announced that the COM-HPC Carrier Board Design Guide is released and freely available on the PICMG website.
The 160-page design guide provides electronics engineers and PCB layout engineers comprehensive information for designing custom system carrier boards for COM-HPC modules.
Standard COM-HPC modules plug into a carrier or baseboard that is typically customized to the application. Benefits of COM-HPC are fast and cost-effective layouts with high design security for application specific embedded and edge computing boards based on open standards.
To save pins on COM-HPC modules, the sideband signals for the 10G / 25G / 40G / 100G Ethernet KR interfaces are serialized and must then be deserialized on the carrier board. The design guide provides instructions for this in a series of diagrams.
The guide provides enhanced schematics and block diagrams for all provided interfaces such as:
- Serial ATA
- PCI Express up to Gen 5
- USB4
- Boot SPI
- eSPI
- eDP
- MIPI-CSI
- SoundWire
- Asynchronous serial port interfaces
- I2C/I3C
- GPIO
- System Management Bus (SMBus)
- Thermal protection
- Module type detection
PCB design rule summaries assists engineers in efficiently designing fully signal compliant COM-HPC carrier boards.
A section has been added to discuss mechanical considerations including heat spreader/module attachment, alternative board stack assemblies and board stiffeners for carrier boards.
The design guide and base specification are accompanied by a Platform Management Interface Specification, and the COM HPC EEEP.
The existing Embedded API (eAPI) specification also applies to COM-HPC. Christian Eder, chairman of the COM-HPC committee, said, "This comprehensive document will further accelerate the fast start of the COM-HPC standard. While the specification documents in themselves are already of great use for developers, the detailed Carrier Board Design Guide helps to avoid design problems, especially when handling high-speed signals, such as PCIe Gen 5 and USB4. I expect to see further time-to-market improvements for COM-HPC-based solutions.
(Note: Electronic design engineers and printed circuit board developers shall note that while the design guide contains additional detailed information it does not replace the PICMG COM-HPC specification.
For complete guidelines on the design of COM-HPC compliant carrier boards and systems, it is necessary to refer to the full specification - the design guide is not intended to be the only source for any design decisions. Besides consulting the latest COM-HPC specification, it is also strongly recommended to use the module vendors' product manuals as a reference.)
For more information, visit picmg.org.
Chad Cox. Production Editor, Embedded Computing Design, has responsibilities that include handling the news cycle, newsletters, social media, and advertising. Chad graduated from the University of Cincinnati with a B.A. in Cultural and Analytical Literature.
