Introduction

The BL50S is a maintenance-free fanless box computer that has been designed for embedded storage applications such as content servers or video recorders. It offers two external SATA shuttles with hot-plugging support.

On the front of the rugged BL50S, as many as 5 Gigabit Ethernet interfaces are accessible. Four of these ports share one Gigabit Ethernet port from the chipset via a switch, while one port is used exclusively as Gigabit Ethernet uplink. The four ports routed over the switch support Power-over-Ethernet.

One PCI Express® Mini Card slot with two SIM card slots offers the possibility to implement the wide range of functionality available on this form factor. This includes, for example, mobile service standards GSM (2G), UMTS (3G), LTE (4G) and derivates, wireless communication standards WLAN / Wi-Fi IEEE 802.11 and derivates as well as positioning systems GPS or GLONASS.

The BL50S is powered by an AMD Embedded G-Series APU (Accelerated Processing Unit), the T48N, running at 1.4 GHz. The G-Series combines low-power CPUs and advanced GPUs, in this case, an AMD Radeon™ HD 6310, into a single embedded device. The use of the Embedded G-Series makes for high scalability in CPU (single/dual core) and graphics performance (various Radeon™ GPUs or none at all).

The BL50S is equipped with 2 GB of DDR3 SDRAM and offers SD card and mSATA slots. The system is designed for fanless operation at temperatures from -40 to +70°C (+85°C for up to 10 minutes), its special aluminium housing with cooling fins serves as a heatsink for the internal electronics and in this way provides conduction cooling.

The BL50S supports one DisplayPort® interface with a resolution of 2560×1600. In addition, a multitude of other I/O is available at the front panel, including two USB 2.0 and variable slots for legacy serial I/O (e.g. RS232) or CAN bus.

The BL50S comes with its own integrated class S2 wide-range power supply with 24 and 36 VDC nominal input voltage (10 to 50.4 V) and a power consumption of 30 W and is in compliance with EN 50155 and ISO 7637-2 (E-mark for automotive). The power can be switched on and off using an ignition signal on the power connector, and a run-down time after switching off the power can be adjusted by software.

The combination of the various CPU/GPU options with the available selection of external interfaces makes for an extremely flexible system design that can quickly be tailored to a vast number of applications.