InHand's Atom-Based SBC Board Delivers Impressive Performance-Power Ratio

InHand Electronics, a company that is focused on delivering low-power embedded systems to OEMs, has announced today the launch of its new full-function, single board computer (SBC), designed to take advantage of the low-power specifications of Intel's Atom platform. Dubbed FireFly, the new motherboard is said to be capable of operating at approximately 4.5 watts, while in sleep state the board only requires 500mW of power. These features enable the company to claim that the FireFly is the smallest and most power efficient full-function Atom-based SBC and the only full-function solution that has DDR2 and expansion capabilities on-board.

“The performance and low power of FireFly far surpass anything we’ve seen on the Intel Atom system market thus far,” stated Dan Rowland, VP of Marketing at InHand Electronics. “In our most recent tests, FireFly’s performance is comparable to that of the Dell Mini [Inspiron 1210], at a fraction of the power consumption. And with no need for time or money to create a daughter card for a full-function system, FireFly offers a quick and easy time-to-market without compromising power or performance!”

Measuring just 95mm x 114mm, the FireFly can be featured with the Intel Atom Z510 processor, clocked at 1.1GHz, or the 1.6GHz Z530 CPU. The board is built on the US15W Intel chipset and delivers support for up to 1GB of DDR2 memory. Other features included on-board are two PATA interfaces, optional SATA via daughter card or ExpressCard, two USB 2.0 ports and one USB 2.0 client port, optional 802.11 b/g, Bluetooth 2.0 and 20-channel GPS module, 10/100 Ethernet, MicroSD and ExpressCard expansion slots. A number of additional features are available with the daughter card expansion.

Designed for the embedded market segment, the board is already available, but the company didn't deliver any details regarding the pricing of the new revision of its Atom-based FireFly SBC.