VIA Technologies Announced Mobile-ITX Form Factor Targeted for Ultra Portable and Smartphone Market

With the market trend moving towards smaller form factor motherboard design, board manufacturers are aggressively driving towards this direction and similarly for VIA Technologies, the company has just announced a new Mobile-ITX standard targeted for ultra small form factor design such as UMPC (Ultra Mobile PC) and smartphone markets.

Mobile-ITX is the fourth generation of miniaturization form factor driven by this fab-less company since the first Mini-ITX being announced back to 2001. With a new standard form factor coming out almost every two to three years from Em-ITX, Nano-ITX, Pico-ITX and the newly announced Mobile-ITX, the board size has been consistently reduced by approximately 50 percent (except Em-ITX) that makes it a great advantage for next generation ultra compact X86 based embedded PC systems. The Mobile-ITX standard measured at only 6cm x 6cm, which is even tinier than credit card size has been shrunk by half as compared to Pico-ITX form factor design. Impressively, the COM (Computer-on-module) has able to pack CPU, memory controller, graphics and necessary IO interfaces such as LCD, USB, LPC, SPI, IDE, SDIO, GPIO and etc that offers a feature-rich connectivity options possible even on a compact and lightweight design. To make it a full complete solution, there is also a carrier board being developed so that the Mobile-ITX module can be plugged into it for feature expansion.

In conjunction with the announcement, VIA Technologies has released a new reference design based on VIA C7-M ULV processor pairing with its VX820 media chipset to accelerate customer design to market.