The ECX-PCIE is a mezzanine side card for EKF CompactPCI® Serial CPU boards, equipped with a PCIe® Gen3 packet switch, on-board NVMe and SATA mass storage, and high speed front I/O.
The PCI Express® switch supports a CompactPCI® Express (aka PXI Express™) backplane with four links organized as Gen3 x4, thereby replacing a CompactPCI® Express CPU card. This enables a hybrid system which is comprised of two backplanes, CompactPCI® Serial boards to the left, and CompactPCI® Express peripheral cards to the right. The CompactPCI® Serial CPU controls also the CompactPCI® Express backplane via the ECX-PCIE mezzanine card.
The ECX-PCIE is suitable for EKF CPU carrier cards such as the SC5-FESTIVAL, with support for 8 x PCIe® lanes on a mezzanine board.
The CPU carrier board and ECX-PCIE side card assembly requires 10HP common front panel width, and must be inserted into the particular system slots of two adjacent backplanes. While the CPU card fits into a CompactPCI® Serial backplane which has its system slot right aligned, the ECX-PCIE meets the left aligned system slot of the neighbouring CompactPCI® Express backplane.
In addition, the ECX-PCIE is provided with an M.2 socket for an NVMe (PCIe®) or SATA SSD module. Another socket is suitable for either a PCIe® Mini Card, or mSATA SSD. Furthermore, the ECX-PCIE is equipped with three GbE and three USB 3.0 ports for front I/O, which expands the native CPU carrier card I/O. As an option, the front panel can be provided with SMA antenna connectors for WWAN or WLAN operation.
