Differences between industrial control motherboard and commercial motherboard

Recently, people often ask what is the difference between industrial control motherboard and commercial motherboard? What's good? What's the good? So I consulted our colleagues in the Technology Department. Although the answers they gave me were not systematic and complete, I still summarized the following differences between the two based on their research:

1. Dimensions:

At present, the commercial motherboard mainly adopts ATX architecture;

In order to adapt to a variety of application environments, the industrial control motherboard adopts various sizes and specifications of motherboards, including ATX, Micro-ATX, MINI-ITX, BABY-ITX and other specifications, according to different environments.

2. Support for expansion slot:

Commercial motherboards often only provide 4 PCI slots. Due to the restriction of PCI specifications, the driving capacity of PCI4 has a considerable attenuation, so most commercial motherboards only provide 3 PCI slots;

Due to the industrial nature of its design materials, the support for PCI slots of the industrial control motherboard can easily realize the support for five PCIs, and will not cause the attenuation of PCI drive capability. At the same time, it can support PCI-E devices with high bandwidth. With ISA slot, it can realize good support for industrial ISA low-speed acquisition card and data card. Embedded GPIO bus can realize GPI and GPO functions.

3. Components used:

Due to the timeliness of the products pursued by the commercial motherboard and the market positioning of its own products, the selection of components generally only needs to meet the service life of 2 to 3 years of system operation;

The selection of materials for the industrial control main board will select components that have been verified for a long time with high requirements to ensure the high reliability requirements of the product under adverse conditions. For example, some solid-state capacitors and closed inductors that only appear in servers and high-end commercial motherboards.

4. Use environment:

Industrial control mainboards often work in harsh environments (long working hours, bad weather, humidity, vibration, dust, radiation, high temperature, etc.), but commercial mainboards are not competent in these environments. Most of today's commercial mainboards can only operate in stable environments (short working hours, indoor, normal temperature, etc.).

5. Life cycle:

The commercial mainboard market has been upgraded very quickly, so the general commercial mainboard only has a life cycle of half a year to one year;

6. Product reliability:

Due to the market positioning of ordinary commercial motherboards, their products generally only need CCC certification, Great Wall certification and civil EMC certification for electronic products;

Because the industrial control motherboard is aimed at the industrial market, it is required to meet the requirements of reliability. Before each motherboard goes on the market, it will be tested and certified according to the industrial requirements such as CEEMC, FCC, QAealability, CCC, vibration and falling.

7. Management:

The commercial motherboard only provides the simplest remote management (realized by connecting to the network and using third-party software, such as REALVNC, PCANYWHARE, etc.);

In addition to providing similar remote connection management, the industrial control motherboard can also realize the remote unattended automatic switch function. Through the embedded IPMB and SMNP-1000 modules, the functions of managing, recording and sending the real-time operation information of the system can be realized.

8. Customization:

Once the commercial motherboard is produced, it can no longer be changed according to the market demand, and it is completely useless for the design of household.

9. Storage interface:

The commercial motherboard only provides the common storage interface IDE and SATA;

The industrial control motherboard can provide multiple storage interface requirements such as IDE, SATA, SCSI, CF card and DOC.

10. Protection function:

The commercial motherboard does not provide any protection functions;

Through special design, the industrial control motherboard can realize the functions of automatic restart of the watchdog and anti-surge impact in case of abnormal conditions such as crash, and fully guarantee the requirements of high stability of the system in harsh environment.

From the above comparison, we can clearly understand that the industrial control motherboard is designed for the industrial era in terms of size, design, materials, production, manufacturing and market scale, to ensure the normal and high reliability of the industrial system. I believe that the industrial field is more and more relevant to people's life.