The Case of the Curious Curie 96Board (.PDF Download)

The 96Board specification was created by Linaro, launched to foster the ARM ecosystem. The 96Board specification is actually a collection of three platforms for Cortex-A and Cortex-M platforms, including the Consumer Edition (CE), Enterprise Edition (EE), and IoT Edition (IE). The latter is only 30 by 60 mm.

All are based around a low speed, 2- by 20-pin mezzanine expansion connector with a 2-mm pitch. The connector supports up to a pair of UARTs, an SPI bus, up to two I2C interfaces, an optional I2S interface, and a dozen GPIOs. There are power and reset connections, as well. A 3.3 V version is defined with a 2 by 15 pin header with a 2.54-mm/0.1-in pitch.

Somewhere along the line the designers forgot about the ARM connection and started delivering boards based on other processor architectures like Intel’s x86 platforms. These tended to be larger chips and suitable for the larger form factors like the EE board. That is until recently.