As one of our Executive Forum participants pointed out, more pure bandwidth for data transfers isn’t always a problem. Sometimes the available bandwidth goes into ensuring transfers can get rolling with low latency, and that’s the motivation behind the Connect Tech Xtreme/104-Express. With eight serial ports presented on headers, this board fulfills the need for more serial ports with no waiting in PCI/104-Express systems through a x1 PCI Express port. All serial ports are selectable as RS-232/422/485, and the board operates from -40 °C to +85 °C. Connect Tech will soon release a similar version featuring 3 kV optical isolation on all ports.