Nottingham’s Micro Control Systems has a new ruggedised personal computer, the Silicon System, that is based entirely on solid state CMOS technology: it has no moving parts, is housed in sealed casing and is claimed to be virtually maintenance free; the heart of the new system is a solid state disk drive substitute with a predicted mean time between failure of 7.3 years; the computer can accomodate up to four silicon disks, providing up to 48Mb of memory; Micro Control says that the use of CMOS technology means there is little heat generation, approximately 1.5 Watts, which enables the computer to be totally sealed; the solid state secondary storage is claimed to be very fast, 1Mbyte-per-second, and the boards can be populated with random access memory and EPROM, including flash EPROM which enables the memory to be reprogrammed; the passive backplane technology facilitates the replacement of boards; no prices.
