Single-board computer
A computer-on-module is a type of single-board computer made to plug into a carrier board, baseboard, or backplane for system expansion.
The rapid adoption of IBM's standards for peripherals and the standardization of the PCI bus in the 1990s made motherboards and compatible components and peripherals cheap and ubiquitous, while the development of multimedia platforms such as the CD-ROM and Sound Blaster cards had begun to fast outpace the rate at which users needed to replace their personal computers.
Originally intended for education, the Raspberry Pi contained a number of features, such as optimized Linux support and programmable GPIO pins, that were also greatly appealing to hobbyists, who used the Pi, and other comparable SBCs, for projects such as home automation, video game emulation, media streaming, and other experimentation.
[8] In industry, the rapid growth of smartphones and other small-scale devices encouraged hardware manufacturers to move towards more frequent use of SoCs and the reduction of motherboards in size, extensibility and complexity, while the proliferation of the Internet of Things increased demand for small, cheap components that would allow unconventional devices to access the Internet.
While this has greatly increased performance and power efficiency, it has raised concerns that single-board computers, particularly those built around SoCs, are harder to repair and may be less friendly to attempts to monitor or modify instructions programmed into the boards by manufacturers.
[9] The introduction of AI-enabled SBCs, advancements in chip integration, and the rise of eco-friendly designs have further driven the evolution of these systems[10][11].
Raspberry Pi, which gained massive popularity for education and hobbyist projects, went public in 2024, demonstrating the significant demand for SBCs across industries.
[12] Modern SBCs now cater to industrial automation, IoT devices, machine learning, and edge computing.
Educational SBCs continue to provide accessible platforms for learning programming and electronics, while their industrial counterparts are critical for innovative technologies like autonomous systems.
This has sparked discussions about right-to-repair legislation and the development of more sustainable and modular designs, addressing these concerns while ensuring continued innovation in SBC technology.
In the case of PC104, the bus is not a backplane in the traditional sense but is a series of pin connectors allowing I/O boards to be stacked.
In the Intel PC world, the intelligence and interface/control circuitry is placed on a plug-in board that is then inserted into a passive (or active) backplane.
Some single-board computers have connectors that allow a stack of circuit boards, each containing expansion hardware, to be assembled without a traditional backplane.
