The MVME197LE was the successor to the popular 88100-based MVME187 boards. It was the first MVME board based on the second generation 88110 CPU and, being still a single-height 6U SBC, features the same expansion options as previous Motorola SBCs.
The RAM on these boards, either 32 or 64MB four-way interleaved ECC memory, consists of DRAM chips mounted directly on the lower side of the board and supposedly made up for a larger part of its cost. Up to two MVME297 memory expansion boards are supported, attached via a set of 3 golden connectors to the 197 board or underlying 297 board, if stacked.
Most of the system I/O-functions were placed on Motorola-designed ASICs:
The rest of the onboard I/O-functionality was implemented with products from 3rd-party manufacturers. All the needed functional parts are integrated onto a single VME board. Besides the break-out board that attaches to the P2-VME connector no other peripheral boards are needed. The P2-port is compatible to other MVME boards from Motorola; the MVME712 boards were the most popular P2-boards which provided backside connections as e.g. RS232C serial (mostly DB9), parallel, Ethernet (either AUI or BNC), centronics SCSI.