PC632M
The successor to the PC532E is the PC632M. The "M" means module. A DE0-Nano board resp. module from Terasic is the heart of the system. The other part is the carrier board which is shown in figure 1. The carrier board contains the power supply and some peripherals. A switching regulator generates 5 V and a linear regulator provides 3.3 V. The following interfaces are available :
- an Ethernet PHY with 10/100 Mbit based on an Intel LXT972 device,
- one RS232 serial port,
- a PATA interface,
- two USB 1.1 ports with the function realized in the FPGA,
- a SD-Card interface,
- one white LED for general purpose signaling,
- and finally a real time clock circuit with a battery.
Fig. 1. The carrier board of the PC632M system.
Fig. 2. The complete PC632M system.
The notebook hard disk drive is screwed to the carrier board. But as time goes by please note:
New notebook PATA drives are no longer buyable! Don't throw away your old ones.
A SATA interface can be build with an FPGA. But this is not trivial and requires transceivers inside the FPGA. For sure we will see one day a M32632 CPU attached to a SATA drive. Preferable a SSD ...
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