Taipei, Taiwan – AAEON, an industry-leading provider of embedded solutions, has announced the latest addition to its line of PICO-ITX boards: the PICO-ADN4. Equipped to host CPUs from across the latest Intel® Core™ i3 Processor N-series, Intel Atom® x7000E Series, Intel® Processor N-series platform (formerly Alder Lake-N), the PICO-ADN4 sees substantial upgrades to a variety of key features when compared to its predecessors.
Catering to the needs of Industry 4.0 deployments, such as industrial automation and assembly line quality control, the PICO-ADN4 is available in SKUs with both standard (0°C ~ 60°C) and wide-temperature (-40°C ~ 85°C) ranges, which, paired with a fanless design, make it suitable for factory deployment. While the board itself only supports 12V DC input, among its optional accessories is a DC-DC converter that enables 9V ~ 36V power input to make it suitable for environments with unstable power sources.
One major change that those familiar with AAEON’s PICO-ITX line will note is the board’s move from LPDDR4x to LPDDR5 system memory, intended to bring about higher data transmission speeds for deployments requiring low latency. The board’s system memory is also soldered, which is beneficial for applications that encounter vibration.
In response to feedback from its customer base, AAEON has also equipped the board with a more advanced Ethernet interface, with one of its two RJ-45 ports supporting Intel® I226-V for 2.5GbE, while its second RJ-45 retains Realtek RTL8111H-CG support for gigabit Ethernet networking. Other physical interfaces on the board include two USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports, alongside an HDMI 1.4 port.
For internal connectors, the PICO-ADN4 offers a wider variety of functions, including two serial COM connectors for RS-232/422/485, 4-bit GPIO, and SMBus (co-lay I2C). These interfaces grant users a diverse set of outlets to facilitate important communication and control tasks when deployed alongside existing industrial machinery. As noted, the display output offered includes HDMI, but there is also an LVDS connector available, co-laid with eDP for human-machine interface (HMI) displays.
Expansion-wise, the PICO-ADN4 supports Wi-Fi via an M.2 2230 E-Key, as well as additional storage via a full-size mSATA slot, which can also accommodate an mPCIe module via the board’s BIOS settings. A BIO rounds off the PICO-ADN4’s expansion features, allowing users to obtain functions such as DDI, LPC, PCIe, or SMBus, although this does require a customized BIOS.
Given the board’s low-power processor lineup, it provides an extremely power-efficient solution. Despite this, the Intel® Core™ i3 Processor N-series, Intel Atom® x7000E Series, Intel® Processor N-series platform offers users substantial upgrades to graphic capability, with Intel® UHD Graphics for 12th Gen Intel® Processors providing a higher graphics render clock frequency, as well as the CPUs themselves capable of higher single-core frequencies when compared to the previous generation.
The PICO-ADN4 is now in mass production. For more information, please visit its product page.
