Generally speaking, there are the following types:
The common 3.5-inch boards, PC104 boards, MINI-ITX, PICO-ITX, NANO-ITX, ETX and so on belong to the board type of embedded motherboards.
Often on the motherboard will come with: VGA interface (some embedded motherboards will come with DVI, HMD, LVDS/TTL and other display interfaces, LVDS/TTL used to connect to the LCD display; 945 chipset above the motherboard can also support asynchronous dual-display), USB interface (low-end motherboards can only be connected to the storage of the use of USB flash drives, the main point to see the system inside the driver with a USB device), the keyboard (low-end motherboards can only be connected to the storage of the use of USB flash drives, the main point to see the system inside the driver with no USB device with the driver), keyboard / mouse, parallel port, serial port (generally with multiple serial port, many devices are also done through the serial port control, communication) IDE interface (high-end motherboards generally with SATA interface), network port, GPIO port, etc., and usually also with a function of the expansion interface, such as: PC104, PCI104, MINI-PCI and other similar expansion interface, storage expansion interface, such as: CF card. Storage expansion interface such as: CF card interface (low-end motherboard will also have DOC interface).
3.5 Embedded motherboard series volume is only equivalent to the size of a 3-inch hard disk. (There are onboard CPU low-end motherboards, there are also non-board; motherboards are generally available to support the Windows system, so the performance is generally speaking higher than the PC104 motherboards, common PC104 motherboards are generally on the DOS; some motherboards are not only affixed to the top of the CPU in addition to this will also be the onboard memory, 128/256 are available, it is indeed ALL-IN-ONE.)
PC104 motherboard (motherboards are generally onboard CPU, onboard memory sticks, onboard electronic disk) is very common, there are two kinds of specifications: X86 and ARM. X86-based PC104 motherboards many producers to do, basically low-end on the DOS system, but there are exceptions, there are producers can be on the PM1GHZ or more, of course, the price is also super expensive. pc104 embedded Motherboards and other motherboards in general, are embedded in the equipment used to do control, so many industries can be used. For example, the use of hospital monitors, blood analyzers and other medical equipment, as well as locomotive control above (Zhuzhou, a large company is a case). So not only for the military industry (military industry in China is not a few domestic producers can do).
MINI-ITX motherboards, created by VIA specifications, size 17CM * 17CM, high integration, low cost, mostly used in commercial terminals, such as financial POS, KIOSK and so on. More popular is based on the INTEL ATOM processor MINI motherboard, of course, many commercial producers do commercial computer boards, the price is very good, usually in the 500 dollars or so (1.6GHZ motherboards 945 chipset, not much to do here.)
PICO-ITX motherboard, in 2007, VIA released the world's smallest business board type motherboard EPIA® Pico-ITX, the size of only 10 cm x 7.2 cm. In order to make the x86 architecture used in the previous due to space reasons can not be realized in the embedded system, VIA EPIA® Pico-ITX provides an innovative platform alternative to other standard embedded motherboards or x86 system modules. The motherboards are small in size, retaining only the most basic PC functionality, with little expandability for portable or more mobile devices!
NANO-ITX The VIA Nano-ITX is a highly integrated native x86 embedded platform that measures only 12 cm x 12 cm, which is 50% smaller than a Mini-ITX board.
ETX, which stands for Embedded Technology eXtended, is a new standard for industrial SOM (System on Module) applications, with a form factor of 114mm x 95mm. The ETX module consists of two parts: an ETX CPU module, and an ETX customized carrier board.