VIA Unveils VAB-820 Pico-ITX Board Powered by Freescale i.MX6 Quad

About two weeks ago, VIA announced the VAB-820, which according to the company, is the first ARM based quad core Pico-ITX single board computer (SBC) on the market. A claim that looks to be incorrect by the way. The board is powered by Freescale i.MX6Quad quad core ARM Cortex A9 processor, and comes with 1GB DDR3 SDRAM and 4GB eMMC Flash. This is an industrial board targeting in-vehicle, surveillance and industrial applications, designed to work in an operating temperature range from -20°C ~ 70°, and with a seven years longevity support.

VAB-820 Specifications:

• SoC – Freescale i.MX 6Quad ARM Cortex-A9 @ 1.0GHz with Vivante GC2000 GPU
• System Memory – 1GB DDR3-1066 SDRAM using 128M x16 memory devices
• Storage – 4MB SPI Serial Flash, 4GB eMMC Flash, and microSD slot (up to 64GB)
• Connectivity – Gigabit Ethernet using Micrel KSZ9031RNX Ethernet transceiver with RGMII support
• Audio – Freescale SGTL5000 low power stereo codec
• Video Decoder – ADI ADV7180 10-Bit, 4 x oversampling SDTV video decoder
• Video Output – HDMI 1.4 transmitter + Composite output
• USB – SMSC USB2514 USB 2.0 high speed 4-port hub controllers
• Onboard I/O
  • COM connector with power supply (supports 8-wire DTE mode)
  • COM/CAN connector with power supply (supports 2-wire RS232 Tx/Rx and 2 FlexCAN Tx/Rx ports)
  • Dual-channel, 18/24-bit LVDS connector
  • RTC battery connector
  • MIPI CSI-2 connector (supports 2 data lanes)
  • SPI master connector (supports 2 SPI slave devices)
  • S-video pin header
  • 2 POE pin headers (support optional PD power board)
  • Front audio pin header for line-in, headphone-out and MIC-in
  • Boot flash select pin header (for SPI or micro SD)
  • Miscellaneous pin header for 1 USB 2.0 host port, 1 USB2.0 OTG port
  • Miscellaneous pin header for 1 I2C pair, 8 GPIOs, system reset button and LEDs for power/WPAN/WLAN/WWAN
  • 12V DC-in power connector
  • Mini PCI-e slot (supports multiple connections and buses including JTAG)
• Front I/O
  • Micro SD connector
• Rear I/O
  • HDMI port
  • 2x USB 2.0 ports
  • RJ-45 LAN port (supports optional IEEE802.3at type 2, that’s PoE)
  • Composite RCA jack
• Watch Dog Timer
• Operating Temperature – Extended temperature: -20~ 70°C
• Operating Humidity – 0% ~ 95% (relative humidity ; non-condensing)
• Form Factor – 8-layer PCB, 10 cm x 7.2 cm (Pico-ITX)

The company provides board support packages (BSP) for Android 4.2.2 and Embedded Linux 3.0.35
operating systems. A embedded Linux evaluation kit is available for download for the VAB-820 board and  AMOS-820 (VAB-820 board with rugged enclosure). The embedded board comes with a DC-in power cable, an audio cable, a USB cable, and a COM cable (3-wired) for debugging via the console.

Sample units of the VIA VAB-820 Pico-ITX board are available now, and you can visit VIA VAB-820 page.

Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)

Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.

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