Choux69 wrote on 2023-02-07, 22:00:Hello. ICOP manufactures and sells SBCs which look like a plug-in ISA card, with the card being a fully equipped motherboard.
Ex […]
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Hello. ICOP manufactures and sells SBCs which look like a plug-in ISA card, with the card being a fully equipped motherboard.
Examples under this link
https://www.icop.com.tw/product_list/43
I am curious to know if this type of SBCs have a specific name,
See the site you link to: "Half-size SBC"
and I am struggling to understand how they work...
So you insert this SBC, which is a motherboard, in the ISA port of another mo […]
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and I am struggling to understand how they work...
So you insert this SBC, which is a motherboard, in the ISA port of another motherboard?
Do you end up with a config having 2 CPUs, chipsets etc...?
Thanks
In theory you should stick these in a passive backplane, with the bus being controlled by the SBC, with extra slots on the backplane. Generally power is also provided by the backplane, at least up to the time when 12V CPU power became common, which was plugged directly into the SBC.
You can however get away with using a regular motherboard for power and the bus - but you need to make sure its own components do nothing whatsoever with the bus. Removing CPU and BIOS chip usually does that job admirably. Once, a long long time ago when a P3 was still a usable desktop computer, but P3 SBCs were already being dumped for little to nothing, I took some ancient low-profile old desktop and inserted the a P3 SBC I'd gotten my hands on somehow. Cue amazed people seeing it running Windows 2000 and going online and stuff 😉
PICMG is a standard for combining PCI and ISA in an interoperable way. PICMG SBCs are bigger, as they have the ISA slot in the normal place and PCI in front of it, even 64b PCI(-X) in some cases, and PCIe in newer versions. But the older versions are still around to support the kind of industrial systems these devices were used in. That means you can get a Core i7 PICMG 1.0 board and use it to replace that 25-year old Pentium MMX that finally burnt out after at least a decade with no heatsink due to the connecting glue failing - in the same backplane with the same peripherals (true story from one of my employer's data centers 😜 )
