PICMG’s COM Express technology, in all of its various shapes and sizes, has been deployed for more than a decade now in size, weight, and power-conscious (SWaP-conscious) applications. The technology has traditionally been deployed in everything from gaming systems to military-grade signal processing, but the recent Type 7 pinout looks to expand on that.

The COM Express Type 7 pinout removes the graphics interface present in the Type 6 pinout to allow for a 4×10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) port as well as additional PCI Express (PCIe) lanes. This now allows headless processors such as the Intel Xeon embedded CPUs based on the Broadwell microarchitecture to be designed into COM Express modules, opening up a world of higher performance applications to the COM Express spec in communications, servers, and the data center.

But don’t take my word for it, hear how COM Express Type 7 is being designed and used today from Gerhard Edi, Chief Technology Officer at congatec, whom I met with at electronica 2016 in Munich, Germany.