Posted by John Keller

ECHING, Germany, 25 Jan. 2012. Kontron in Eching, Germany, is introducing the company's power-on built-in test (PBIT) capability on Kontron VPX, OpenVPX, and VME single-board computers to improve the reliability, safety, and security of mission-critical aerospace, defense, and transportation applications.

Kontron PBIT provides a modular and scalable set of uniform test routines to assess the health and configuration of boards and systems to improve diagnostics, minimize maintenance, and reduced debugging of rugged embedded computing systems, Kontron officials say.

The Kontron PBIT is available for Kontron 3U and 6U VPX/OpenVPX and VME processor boards, where it is stored in a non-volatile memory. Although hosted on the CPU board, Kontron PBIT not only checks the on-board components such as controllers, sensors, and RAM, but also looks for peripheral components across the backplane, XMC/PMC slots, and those connected via USB and SATA.

Learning mode enables Kontron PBIT to capture intricate system configurations and minimize the risk of security breaches in fielded computers by preventing the system boot of unauthorized applications.

Kontron PBIT launch automatically after the firmware boot by the BIOS or EFI on x86 CPU boards or Uboot on PowerPC CPU boards, or started interactively from the firmware prompt. For more information contact Kontron online at www.kontron.com.