MicroTCA Summit thoroughly covers emerging standards platforms

MicroTCA Summit thoroughly covers emerging standards platforms

*The 2007 MicroTCA Summit will be held May 30 through June 1 at the Sheraton Inner Harbor, Baltimore, MD. Exhibits open noon Thursday and Friday. For more information, visit http://www.microtcasummit.com.

The 2007 MicroTCA Summit in Baltimore, MD* will give attendees practical information on the current state of MicroTelecommunications Computing Architecture (MicroTCA), the emerging standard platform for small to medium sized wireline and wireless telecommunications, defense, and medical systems. Conference attendees and exhibit visitors will get the latest on system design, cooling, switch fabrics, interoperability, maintenance, software, expansion, and standards. Here are just a few products that will be showcased from the more-than-30 exhibitors.

Emerson Network Power (Madison, WI; Booth ##26) will show its EMC6000 and EMC6200 communication and computing platforms that give designers multiple options, including a 6U 19-in. rack-mount chassis that can support up to 12 single or double, compact or full AMC modules. Molex (Lisle, IL; Booth #9) will demonstrate a new fully redundant dual-star architecture backplane and development chassis that allows developers to build and debug designs before production. The backplane is designed to run at 10 Gbits/s.

Molex uTCA backplane

Yamaichi Electronics USA (San Jose, CA; Booth #22) will show the CN084 adapter for connection between a MicroTCA backplane and MCH modules, with from 170 to 680 contact pins. Kontron America (Poway, CA; Booth #5) will have the AM4010 CPU board single mid-size or full-size AMC module that is based on Intel Core Duo and the Intel Core 2 Duo processors combined with the Intel 3100 chipset. The card fits in industrial-environment long-life embedded applications.

Emerson uTCA chassis

ept (West Boylston, MA; Booth #24) has new power connectors for MicroTCA systems that combine the familiar hm2.0-8 connector with 72 signal contacts and a UPM power component with 24 power contacts, using reliable Tcom press press-fit technology. CorEdge Networks (Boston, MA; Booth #29) will feature a 10-GbE fabric module for MicroTCA Carrier Hub (MCH) providing non-blocking, low latency switching in a 75-mm form factor providing close to 500 Gbits/s of aggregate switching capacity in the industry’s smallest standard form factor.

VMETRO (Houston, TX; Booth #33) introduces its first AdvancedMC processing module utilizing two Xilinx Virtex-5 LXT FPGAs. This open programmable board enables users to balance controls tasks in microBlaze processors by handling demanding processing in dedicated hardware blocks. Harting (Elgin, IL; Booth #30) will demonstrate a MicroTCA backplane connector that is fully compliant with the PICMG MicroTCA specification, supporting the full range of data transmission speeds up to 12.5 Gbits/s along with µTCA power connectors for both backplanes and power modules.

SANBlaze Technology (Maynard, MA; Booth #4) will provide a look at the SANBlaze SB AMC-FC dual-channel 4-Gbit Fibre Channel AMC adapter that provides high-performance low-latency connectivity to embedded systems. Alliance Systems (Plano, TX; Booth #12) will show the U-3000 communication platform, which supplies 16 single or 8 single and 4 double-wide AMC slots with a fully passive MicroTCA 1.0 backplane, a Pentium M AMC card, and a storage AMC card.

ELMA (Fremont, CA; Booth #15) is announcing the industry’s first dual-redundant cooling MicroTCA shelf. The 8U unit features three fan trays each above and below the card cage and a 14-slot dual-star backplane with 10 AdvancedMC, 2 power module, and 2 MicroTCA Carrier Hub (MCH) slots. BittWare (Concord, NH; Booth #11) will demo the GX-AMC midsize single-wide AdvancedMC based on a Stratix II GX FPGA. It features front-panel I/O, a control plane interface, an IPMI system management interface, an 8X SerDes interface, 10/100 and Gigabit Ethernet.

Actel power module reference design

Actel (Mountain View, CA; Booth #34) will have free reference platforms for system management using the company’s single-chip mixed-signal Fusion programmable system chip. The reference designs include hardware, software, and IP.

—Jim Harrison