Computer systems embedded in industrial, scienti�c, and military equipment are often called upon to perform complex calculations and deliver deterministic, low-latency responses. Examples in this class of control-system applications include simple motor controllers, complex hardware-in-the-loop simulators, and high- precision position-controller sub-systems in semiconductor or micro-manufacturing equipment. When the computing requirements exceed the capacity of any one processor, a single system needs to incorporate multiple processors to accomplish the complex processing.

Designing a multiprocessor system for this class of applications presents several challenges:
• Selecting one or more of the right types of processors
• Finding the most efficient way to move data to and between processors
• Ensuring that data movement occurs within brief, highly predictable time intervals
• Selecting a compute architecture that scales with application complexity and supports product flexibility

This white paper discusses these issues and presents a standards-based approach to address the design challenges. The term TCA refers to both the ATCA® (Advanced Telecommunications Architecture) and MicroTCA® standards as one common architecture.