Palm-sized industrial motherboard

News | December 2, 2020

By Ally Winning

The AIMB-U233 is the first Core i platform in Advantech’s UTX motherboard family. It uses the small form factor design that was previously powered by 8^th generation Intel Core processors (i3-8145UE / i5-8365UE / i7-8665UE). As such, the motherboard provides high computing performance and diverse I/O ports and M.2 expansion slots.

The AIMB-U233 motherboard measures only 112 x 137 mm, while still providing 4x COM, 4x USB, 2x HDMI, 2x GbE LAN, 16-bit GPIO and 3x M.2 expansion slots. Its Intel Core i7-8665UE processor offers smooth performance for complex computing tasks.

The M.2 M-key, M.2 E-key, and M.2 B-key compatible slots support diverse applications and boost computing performance. Combining the M.2 M-key interface with 4-lane NVMe PCIe can increase storage read/write speeds up to 400% over a traditional SATA 3.0 SSD. The system can automatically switch into SATA mode when a cost-effective SATA SSD is installed. The AIMB-U233’s M.2 E-key and M.2 B-key connectors can be used to provide wireless connectivity for the motherboard by adding Wi-Fi/BT and 4G LTE modules. The two expansion slots can also be used for storage through a 2-lane PCIE SSD (M.2 E-key) and/or SATA SSD (M.2 B-key). For machine vision applications, the M.2 E-key connector supports the use of Advantech Movidius AI modules.

To offer protection from cyber attacks, the AIMB-U233 motherboard offers TPM 2.0 for enhanced data security with hardware-based encryption and authentication.

Advantech’s OTA BIOS system provides updates and a backup recovery mechanism. The board currently supports a wide range of Linux distributions, with Advantech providing a Linux image based on Ubuntu 20.04.

More information

Smartek Vision will become FRAMOS Embedded Engineering

Chronocam : Event-based sensing enables machine vision solutions

AI kit based uses Sparse Modelling for easy training