Copyright
©
2013
congatec
AG
TU87m10
33/108
6
Additional Features
6.1
congatec Board Controller (cBC)
The conga-TC87 is equipped with Texas Instruments Tiva™ TM4E1231H6ZRB microcontroller. This onboard microcontroller plays an important
role for most of the congatec embedded/industrial PC features. It fully isolates some of the embedded features such as system monitoring
or the I²C bus from the x86 core architecture, which results in higher embedded feature performance and more reliability, even when the x86
processor is in a low power mode. It also ensures that the congatec embedded feature set is fully compatible amongst all congatec modules.
6.2
Board Information
The cBC provides a rich data-set of manufacturing and board information such as serial number, EAN number, hardware and firmware
revisions, and so on. It also keeps track of dynamically changing data like runtime meter and boot counter.
6.3
Watchdog
The conga-TC87 is equipped with a multi stage watchdog solution that is triggered by software. The COM Express™ Specification does not
provide support for external hardware triggering of the Watchdog, which means the conga-TC87 does not support external hardware triggering.
For more information about the Watchdog feature, see the BIOS setup description in section 10.4.2 of this document and application note
AN3_Watchdog.pdf on the congatec AG website at www.congatec.com.
Note
The conga-TC87 module does not support the watchdog NMI mode. COM Express type 6 modules do not support the PCI bus, therefore the
PCI_SERR# signal is not available. There is no way to drive an NMI to the processor without the presence of the PCI_SERR# PCI bus signal.
6.4
I
2
C Bus
The conga-TC87 supports I
2
C bus. Thanks to the I
2
C host controller in the cBC, the I
2
C bus is multi-master capable and runs at fast mode.
6.5
Power Loss Control
The cBC has full control of the power-up of the module and therefore can be used to specify the behavior of the system after an AC power loss
condition. Supported modes are “Always On”, “Remain Off” and “Last State”.
