SAM440ep-flex

FlexATX Motherboard w/ SoC AMCC 440ep CPU

SAM440ep is the second modular motherboard produced by ACube Systems Srl (see also SAM440ep). Its main characteristics are:

low power consumption
passive cooling
scalability
can run AmigaOS 4.1 :-)

The core of the Sam Flex board is the PowerPC 440EP, a System On Chip (SoC) produced by AMCC under license from IBM. One of the main features of the PowerPC AMCC 440EP is the presence, together with the CPU, of a number of integrated peripherals. This allowed to build a complete system with huge savings of both development and debug time, with less components and space used on the PCB. This also results in a significant cost reduction for the customer.

As a consequence the usual northbridge/southbridge combination is not present on the Sam Flex board since parts of their functionalities are already built into the CPU.

The 440EP chip has a size of 35x35 mm, with a PBGA packaging (456 balls). It is built with CMOS (0.13 um) technology, has a very low power consumption (only 3 Watts at 533 MHz) and it does not require any active cooling system.

Technical data:

FlexATX Form Factor (21.6 x 17 cm)
CPU SoC AMCC 440ep with:
- integrated DDR 266 MHz memory controller
- integrated PCI controller
- integrated Flash memory devices controller
- integrated USB 1.1 Host and 2.0 Device controller
- 2 integrated Ethernet 10/100 ports
- up to 4 serial ports
- 2 I2C interfaces
- SPI interface
- 64 pin for I/O General Purpose
2x DDR DIMM 100 slots, max 1 GB RAM
USB 2.0 OHCI/EHCI NEC PCI controller (2 external ports, 2 internal ports)
Audio Cirrus Logic CS4281 and Realtek ALC655 Codec
Silicon Image 4 Serial ATA ports
Pericom 8150B PCI Bridge
FPGA Lattice XP with 80 pin I/O expansion connector
1 PCI slot - 32 bits, 66 MHz
2 PCI slots - 32 bits, 33 MHz
mini PCI Slot - 32 bits, 33 MHz (optional)
RTC with backup battery
UBoot 1.3.1

The following Operating Systems are available or under development:

AmigaOS 4.1
Aros
Debian Lenny
Fedora 9
Ubuntu
CruxPPC
FreeBSD