Small is beautiful
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During the energy crisis of 1973, E.F. Schumacher, a British economist, published a collection of essays called “Small is Beautiful.” One of his arguments dealt with the false notion of how people measure their standard of living – assuming that people who consume more have a higher standard of living. He argued that since consumption is merely a means to well-being, the aim should be to maximize well-being with the minimum of consumption.
With the current economic and energy situation similar to his day, this mantra holds true with embedded applications maximize innovation with minimum costs and time-to-market. To meet this need, the small and multifaceted Advanced Mezzanine Cards, also known as AdvancedMC modules, provide standards-based, flexible, low-profile, low-power, and costeffective building blocks for numerous applications ranging from telecommunications to aerospace and defense to enterprise, industrial automation, and medical.
AdvancedTCA was defined more than five years ago as a nextgeneration, high-performance telecommunication architecture for core and aggregation layer applications. It was clear that designing large footprint, monolithic AdvancedTCA blades would never satisfy a wide breadth of applications. Hence, the AdvancedMC mezzanine standard was born to provide myriad mix-and-match options that can hot swap into AdvancedTCA carrier boards. The PICMG AdvancedMC subcommittee developed the AdvancedMC specification with flexible and high-bandwidth serial interconnect options with throughputs as high as 12.5 Gbps per lane, standards-based IPMI management, multiple form factors, and power requirements so that AdvancedMC modules could be characterized into numerous functions. Many of the first AdvancedMC modules were designed specifically for AdvancedTCA-based applications, including high-compute modules with high-bandwidth interconnects, high-speed, high-density I/O interface modules, and storage modules. AdvancedMCs are not limited to processor-based modules, although some AdvancedMCs are called PrAMCs, with the "Pr" standing for "processor."
PICMG also had the foresight to support not only AdvancedTCA blades, but also future architectures, an approach that enables AdvancedMCs to be plugged directly onto a backplane. It has been a little more than two years since PICMG members ratified the MicroTCA platform specification, and its low-cost, low-profile, flexible, and appliance-style architecture blasts the doors wide open for the type of applications that AdvancedMC modules can take on. MicroTCA's size and costeffectiveness make it a natural fit for edge or access layer telecommunications applications, military applications where space and power are at a premium such as in an aircraft fuselage or in a Humvee, medical applications such as diagnostic and imaging equipment demanding high-performance and computedense solutions, or costeffective industrial automation or enterprise-level appliances. See Figure 1 for examples of AdvancedMCs and the low-profile MicroTCA platform.
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Figure 1 (click graphic to zoom by 2.2x) |
Today AdvancedMC modules incorporate a wide array of functions to meet the growing demand for numerous embedded applications. The AdvancedMC ecosystem is strong and evolving, supported by a multitude of vendors, leading to new innovations and products at a fast rate.
Market forces at work
Many market forces are swelling the demand for AdvancedMCs, and MicroTCA has helped boost this demand substantially. Embedded designers want to add higher levels of innovation, reach more customers, reduce the costs, and launch the product quickly. Their architectures are testing the boundaries in higher computing densities, higher bandwidth, lower power, and lower profiles. Listed here are a few examples.
4-G wireless network applications
Sprint is working to roll out a WiMAX service, while AT&T and Verizon are focused on Long Term Evolution (LTE), which is the successor to GSM/UTS. The base stations that support these networks need to be modular and scalable, high-bandwidth, low-profile (to fit small cabinets in remote locations), and costeffective. In addition, an organization called Open Base Station Architecture Initiative (OBSAI, www.OBSAI.org) is focused on creating an open market for base stations to reduce development efforts and costs.
With many network equipment providers implementing IP Multimedia Subsystems (IMS) for Voice over IP (VoIP), and video (IPTV), and many other services, OEMs have designed their products with AdvancedTCA and AdvancedMCs. These same vendors can develop scaled-down versions using MicroTCA for smaller deployments and continue to leverage the same AdvancedMC modules. In fact, the use of MicroTCA, which provides ample compute and networking capacity for many installations, has the potential to increase vastly the quantity of AdvancedMCs used in these types of applications.
Aerospace and defense
On the aerospace and defense side, two significant trends are generating demand. The first is the continuing migration to COTS standards-based embedded platforms. The main drivers are to reduce material and development costs while compressing the time needed to reach the market. The second trend is the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) initiative called Network-Centric Operations (NCO) and the UK's Network Enabled Capability (NEC), whose doctrine is to develop standard communication infrastructures to link the diverse set of intelligence gathering platforms, policy makers, commanders, war fighters, and support personnel for all the services. Improved information sharing will ensure a higher level of interoperability and situational awareness and enable highly synchronized missions.
Initiatives include the DoD's Global Information Grid (GIG), the U.S. Army's Future Combat Systems (FCS), and the U.S. Navy's Cooperative Engagement Capability (CEC). Some applications will require a fully ruggedized platform and benefit from the efforts underway within PICMG to specify a ruggedized version of MicroTCA. Other applications, housed in spaces with humans where neither extended temperatures and low air pressure nor extreme shock and vibration are factors, will be able to take advantage of the existing MicroTCA platforms and their low costs.
Development budgets are getting tighter, performance and service expectations are increasing, densities are getting smaller, and consumers are demanding lower prices. In this atmosphere the drive to lower Total Cost of Ownership while offering innovative high-performance applications continues to push the envelope. The "Small is Beautiful" AdvancedMC ecosystem is there to help meet these needs.
Performance Technologies
www.pt.com
tony.romero@pt.com
