FAQs

American Portwell offers various embedded computer hardware. Our extensive product portfolio includes single board computers, small form factor embedded computer boards and systems, Computer-on-module, rackmount computers, communication appliances, medical grade displays and computers, human-machine interfaces, and customized computer platforms.

With 20+ years of experience, American Portwell provides both off-the-shelf and professional custom computer hardware solutions for the industry of Medical Equipment, Industrial Automation, Industrial IoT, Retail Automation, Digital Signage, Auto Test Equipment, Transportation, Communication, Energy, Gaming, Military, and Network Security markets.

American Portwell’s medical computers empower a variety of medical equipment or instruments, such as clinical diagnostic instruments, digital X-ray, surgical imaging management systems, genomics lab equipment, radiotherapy, pharmacy automation, point-of-care devices, patient monitoring, ultrasound systems, and healthcare self-service kiosks.

American Portwell designs and manufactures network appliance, such as application of switches, intelligent gateways, firewall, Software Define Network (SDN), network access control, WAN optimization, unified threat management (UTM), anti-spam/anti-virus, content filtering, content delivery, cloud and edge computing, and load balancing.

American Portwell Technology is located in Silicon Valley since 1999. We are able to do computer products’ final testing, assembly, integration, quality inspection, and logistics. For customer services, we offer warranty services, RMA, and on-site product deployment at the two buildings in Fremont, CA.

American Portwell Technology offers comprehensive computer hardware solutions for network security, medical equipment, industrial automation, gaming and lottery, transportation, military, aerospace, communication/networking, and Industrial IoT markets.

American Portwell Technology offers a variety of networking products for the upcoming 5G infrastructure. Our computer hardware solutions are suitable for servers, data center, edge computing, cloud, switches, and gateway devices. For more information please see our company link.

Our latest addition, CAR-3080, takes advantage of Intel's 8th gen Coffee Lake platform that can go up to 16 cores and up to 32 GbE RJ45/SFP LAN ports, option bypass LAN ports, 2x 10GbE SFP+ ports, and up to 128GB DRAM, IPMI 2.0, TPM 2.0, and Intel QAT. This solution is ideally suited for SDN/NFV; Next-Gen Firewall, UTM, Bandwidth Management, WAN Optimization, and Telecommunication Appliances.

We have recently released our new KUBER-2000 series that is ideal in the industrial IoT space. It is a small palm-sized, flexible and ready-to-use industrial PC. Our KUBER-2000 series is scalable using Intel Apollo Lake processors with a plethora of I/O choices for different application usage. Please see this link for more information and offering our KUBER-2000 series in industrial automation, intralogistics, or smart location usage.

The market has adopted SD-WAN to augment its current WAN connectivity. SD-WAN offers many advantages over the traditional Multiprotocol Label Switching (MLPS) and it can lower the cost of traditional MLPS setups. We have a complete offering of SD-WAN CPE appliances for both the branch side and the campus side. One of our newest addition to the SD-WAN market is our CAD-0255 system.

Our CAR-6010 is the first of its class to feature a maximum of 400-GbE networking bandwidth in a 1U rackmount dual Intel Xeon CPUs. This solution will be a great addition to any datacenter that needs a security appliance with higher networking bandwidth solution.

American Portwell’s standard products offer a wide range of computer form factors including COM-Express (COMe), 3.5”, PICO-ITX, NUC, NANO-ITX,Mini-ITX, Micro-ATX, ATX and PICMG 1.0 and 1.3 Single Board Computer (SBC).

American Portwell’s COM Express modules offer three form factors: basic (125 x 95mm), compact (95 x 95mm) and mini (84 x 55mm); and three standard types: type 6, 7, and 10.

American Portwell’s standard product portfolio also includes Q7 and SMARC products.

American Portwell offers 1U and 2U rackmount network appliances, desktop network appliances and fan-less network appliances. We not only provide wide temperature feature and bypass function for greater reliability, but also support Intel Quick Assist Technology (QAT) for performance and efficiency enhancement, Trusted Platform Module (TPM) for encryption, and Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI 2.0) for monitoring.

American Portwell’s KUBER-2000 series is an ultra-small and ready-to-use industrial PC. Its small foot print, fan-less, ruggedized design, various expansion I/O ports and wireless connectivity make it suitable for gateway device in Industrial IoT or harsh environment.

American Portwell offers medical Panel PCs and medical computer systems, and these medical grade solutions boast long life spans and are in accordance with regulatory compliance UL-60601-1-4th edition. Our medical Panel PCs provide sizes ranges from 10.1” to 23.6”, and they also feature in true flat touch screen, full HD resolution, widescreen display and DICOM compliant; our medical computer systems feature in small form factor with the latest Intel CPU platform, high MTBF and integrated GPU for graphic intensive medical image processing.

American Portwell’s gaming solutions is compliant with SAS/GLI regulation. Their key features include Non-Volatile RAM, battery backup SRAM function for data retention, secured RTC and intrusion detection. We offer Player Tracking System (PTS) and Slot Machine Interface Board (SMIB) that are compliant with SAS/GLI and supported with x86/TI/Freescale platform and several sizes of panels on demand, Gaming Mixer Output (GMO) solutions provide mixed media output that allows you to scale, resize, change color space and overlay.

American Portwell’s GADIWA series provides DC to DC converter with an input voltage range of 6V to 36V and ATX output voltage of -12V, +3.3V, +5V and +12V.

American Portwell is able to offer long product lifespan up to 15 years based on key components such as Intel’s CPU and chipsets.

DP++ is also known as dual-mode DisplayPort, which allows for passive video adapters to connect DisplayPort to other connections such as HDMI or DVI. DP++ is featured on Portwell’s latest products such as the ROBO-6911VG2AR and ROBO-6912VG2AR.

PICMG 1.3, also known as SHB Express (Single Host Board Express), is a standard to interface with PCI Express on a backplane. SHB Express comes in two form factors, a full size and a half size. A maximum of 20 PCIe lanes can be utilized on both PICMG 1.3 full-sized and half-sized form factors. Like COM Express, the PICMG 1.3 standard was created by the PICMG® (PCI Industrial Computer Manufacturers Group), which consists of over 150 companies, including Portwell. (see the latest PICMG 1.3 SBC ROBO-8114)

A Computer-On-Module, or COM, is a computer module with all the necessary components for a bootable computer. A COM module requires a carrier board to bring out any I/O and to bring power to the module. Currently there are 4 types of COM Express modules: Type 10, Type 7, Type 6, Type 2 (Legacy). Like PICMG 1.3, COM Express is also developed by the PICMG® (PCI Industrial Computer Manufacturers Group), which consists of over 150 companies, including Portwell. (See our selection of products here)

Depending if you are using a CPU that a 6th Generation Intel Core Processor (Skylake) or older, it should support Windows 7. Intel Processors that are 7th Generation Intel Core Processors (Kaby Lake) and newer only support Windows 10.

UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) replaces the traditional Legacy BIOS. The benefits of UEFI include CPU independent architecture, drives, pre-OS environment, network capabilities, a modular design, large storage disk usage over 2TB, and backward compatibility with Legacy applications. Typically, another benefit of the UEFI BIOS is that it can be created to have faster boot times than Legacy BIOS. UEFI can also utilize the use of EFI System partition, which is useful for have multiple bootloaders or multiple OS’s.

Portwell can provide our customers with an API to help with their engineer efforts. This API helps our customer monitor our products sensors (PWM fan speed, system temperature, etc.) and allows control over some of our I/O (GPIO, SMBUS, etc.) as well. (Ask about our Portwell Engineering Toolkit)

Portwell is able to implement the following for our customers:

• Trusted Platform Module (TPM 2.0)
• UEFI SecureBoot
• OS Hardening
• Customized BIOS Security features such as: Administrator Password Access for the setup menu, boot devices, BIOS update prevention, etc.

There are two methods that can achieve this.
Both methods require power to be removed from the system.

Method 1:
Using the user’s manual, locate the jumper to clear the CMOS. The jumper is usually close to the CMOS battery that is located on the board. The jumper will need to be moved to the designed pins for 30 seconds in order to clear the CMOS.

Method 2:
Locate the CMOS battery on the board and remove it for 30 seconds. Install the battery again to restore CMOS functionality back to the board.

Yes. Portwell provides many BIOS related services which includes displaying a customer’s customized logo onto the system’s splash screen during system boot up.

The steps you need to take are as follows:
1) During system boot-up, press the “Del” button to enter the BIOS setup menu.
2) Verify the BIOS Boot Mode is set to UEFI, this should be under the “Boot” tab in the BIOS setup menu.
3) While booting, press F7 and select “UEFI: Built-in EFI Shell”
4) Alternatively, you can also enter through the shell from the BIOS setup menu under the tab “Save & Exit” and navigate to Boot Override, UEFI: Built-in EFI Shell