Sam440ep is a PowerPC modular motherboard engineered and produced by ACube Systems, and it is totally made in Italy.
The main features of this board are:
- low power consumption
- passive cooling
- scalability
The core of the board is the PowerPC 440EP, a System On Chip (SoC) produced by Applied Micro under license from IBM.
One of the main features of the Applied Micro PowerPC 440EP is the presence, together with the CPU, of a number of integrated peripherals. This allowed us to build a complete system with a huge savings of both development and debug time, with fewer components and space used on the PCB. This also results in a significant cost reduction for the customer.
As a consequence, the northbridge/southbridge combination is not present on the board. Part of their functionalities are built into the CPU.
For the specific model of CPU mounted on the Sam board, the 440EP, we have the following integrated peripherals:
- DDR memory controller
- PCI controller
- USB 1.1 host and USB 2.0 device controller
- 2 Ethernet 10/100 ports
- Up to 4 serial ports
- 2 I2C interfaces
- SPI interface
- 64 pins for General Purpose I/O