Welcome to the AdvancedTCA Summit
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This issue of CompactPCI and AdvancedTCA Systems finds many of you at the AdvancedTCA Summit.
Hopefully you are attending the Summit in Santa Clara as you read this. This excellent conference, organized by Lance Leventhal and his crew at Conference Concepts, has become the premier event for showcasing AdvancedTCA and, now, MicroTCA technology. It is focused and is the place to be if you are interested in either of these two important platforms. It is also a great "gathering of the clan", where many of us get to spend a little face time with our colleagues with whom we exchange phone calls and e-mail during the rest of the year.
Airing out MicroTCA cooling
Speaking of MicroTCA, this technology continues to generate a lot of interest in the usual places and in some unexpected ones. The military's keen interest, sparked by the platform's management and high availability features, is driving changes to the ongoing expansion of the original standard.
Last year, it became clear that a more ruggedized version of the standard needed to be developed to address segments of the telecom industry that included outdoor equipment, including pole mounted and underground systems. This, of course, is largely related to storage and operational temperature range but not a lot of shock or vibration. Two technical development subcommittees were formed, one focusing on air cooling and the other on conduction cooling for really extreme environments. Then key military vendors, including Boeing and BAE Systems, got involved and successfully convinced the group to expand the scope of the efforts to include not just extended temperature ranges, but high levels of shock, vibration, EMC protection, and even higher temperature extremes.
Clearly defined testing requirements and methodologies are very important to military designers. It has become clear, as Stuart Jamieson of Emerson and Justin Moll and Eike Waltz of Elma explain in this issue, that a single specification - at least for the air-cooled variety - would serve neither the commercial nor the military customer's needs. So it now looks like we'll see separate specs for air-cooled commercial and air-cooled military versions.
10 GbE challenges
The release of the IEEE standards for 10 GbE create some real challenges for the AdvancedTCA and MicroTCA communities and PICMG, as one of the versions raises the data rate to over 10 Gbps on a single pair of conductors, whereas the existing PICMG standard for Ethernet over the backplane uses four pairs. Doug Sandy of Emerson is capably leading the effort within PICMG to update the AdvancedTCA Ethernet definitions to accommodate the new standards, and his article in this issue is a useful primer on the activity.
