Since their introduction in 1991, PC/104 standard based systems have been widely adopted in various applications. Unmanned aircraft control, onboard vehicle control and navigation systems, personal communicators, add-on cards for customer specific boards, all utilize PC/104 technology. Many system developers choose this form-factor due to its advantages in terms of low weight, compact size (boards are just 90×96 mm), ease of application development and modification, and mechanical reliability.

Relative thermal efficiencies measured in MHz per W of Low Voltage Pentium M 738 and Ultra Low Voltage Celeron M 373 are several times higher than that of Pentium M 1.6 GHz.

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Since reliability of the entire system depends on the reliability of its components, system development and the selection of each component (PCBs, connectors, chassis, power supplies, heatsinks etc.) should be done thoroughly, with great attention to details.

Extreme Temperatures and Computing Performance

Many applications require PC/104 systems to operate within a wide temperature range that often exceeds the manufacturers’ recommendations. To considerably increase reliability and widen the operating temperature range, one can choose a more robust version of a certain component type – for example, use tantalum capacitors instead of electrolytic ones. Unfortunately there is no such option for other components such as high-performance CPUs, chipsets, and memory. Therefore, when developing a board for harsh operating conditions, the key tasks are performing a thermal effects analysis, building the board to withstand the worst possible working conditions, and thoroughly and comprehensively testing the product within the entire operating temperature range.