PICOe (PICO Express) within

computer hardware Computer hardware includes the physical parts of a computer, such as the central processing unit (CPU), random-access memory (RAM), motherboard, computer data storage, graphics card, sound card, and computer case. It includes external devices ...

is a

computer form factor Form factor is a hardware design aspect that defines and prescribes the size, shape, and other physical specifications of components, particularly in electronics. A form factor may represent a broad class of similarly sized components, or it may ...

in which a half sized card slot Single Board Computer (SBC) is inserted into a gold fingers card slot of a passive or active

backplane A backplane or backplane system is a group of electrical connectors in parallel with each other, so that each pin of each connector is linked to the same relative pin of all the other connectors, forming a computer bus. It is used to connect s ...

. Expansion peripherals of the computer system are connected to other slots of the backplane.

Electrical Bus Interface

PICOe provides one PCI bus and several PCI Express buses of varying and configurable widths to provide dual faceted interface with other devices on the backplane.

Power

Power is provided to the PICOe SBC and peripheral expansion cards via the backplane.

Connectors

The PICOe computer card slot uses a unique connector footprint with stepped connector depths to promote physical stability in the slot for

ruggedization A rugged computer or ruggedized computer is a computer specifically designed to operate reliably in harsh usage environments and conditions, such as strong vibrations, extreme temperatures and wet or dusty conditions. They are designed from incepti ...

purposes. Other card slots on the backplane may be standard

Conventional PCI Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) is a local computer bus for attaching hardware devices in a computer and is part of the PCI Local Bus standard. The PCI bus supports the functions found on a processor bus but in a standardized format ...

and PCIe connectors. {{Comp-hardware-stub Motherboard form factors