Recent Blog Posts
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Remembering Joe Pavlat
Summer ended with sad news for our OpenSystems Media family when we learned our friend and co-worker, Joe Pavlat, Editorial Director of PICMG Technologies magazine, passed away suddenly at his home in Grass Valley, California. He was only 63 years old.
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On the loss of Joe Pavlat, a friend and mentor
My first day of work in the embedded computing space came the day after the Super Bowl in 2011. I had about as much knowledge of the high-tech industry as your casual commuter who catches a news snippet on one of the big five tech companies while buying their morning coffee, and frankly didn’t think [...]
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COM Express
This popular standard continues to be updated as improvements and changes to silicon continue. The subcommittee has been focused on support for four 10 G KR interfaces with a new Type 7 pinout. Discussions have revolved around the total number of signals to support the 10 G channels, including interfaces for PHY configuration, LEDs, and [...]
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Hardware Platform Management
The Hardware Platform Management (HPM) subcommittee started work in January 2015 with a focus on enabling the PICMG HPM layer for Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6). See the article “Adding IoT friendliness to AdvancedTCA and related specifications” in the Winter 2015 issue of PICMG Systems and Technology for background on the history and importance of [...]
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Physics activities
The Physics community that developed ATCA 3.8 rear transition module (RTM) extension and MTCA.4 with µRTM is very close to issuing a set of new hardware extensions, called MTCA.4.1, which introduce an additional rear backplane to support both precision analog and digital functions. The backplane supports ancillary rear power modules that can deliver positive and [...]
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MicroTCA and the Advanced Mezzanine Card (AMC)
The “Higher Speed Ethernet Fabrics for MicroTCA.0 and AMC.1” group is working on bringing 40 GbE to MicroTCA systems. The committee is currently working on completing signal-integrity studies across the full interconnect channel. S-parameter models for the backplane and AMC have been developed and simulated; work on the MCH is being completed. Combinations of 90 [...]
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100 G AdvancedTCA
PICMG recently released Revision 3 of the PICMG 3.1 specification, which defines the use of Ethernet (and Fibre Channel) on the AdvancedTCA (ATCA) backplane. This important update increases the backplane bandwidth by 2.5 times, from 40 GB/s to 100 GB/s. ATCA remains the fastest open standard for communications applications; this increased bandwidth is critical for [...]
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PICMG continues to upgrade CompactPCI family of specifications
CompactPCI, first adopted as an open industry standard in 1995, is a very popular standard for a implementing a wide range of communications, industrial automation, instrumentation, and military and aerospace applications. It uses the proven Eurocard 3U and 6U mechanical standards and can be convection or conduction cooled. CompactPCI Express, first introduced in 2005, added PCI Express signaling capability across the backplane while maintaining backwards compatibility with earlier versions of CompactPCI. CompactPCI Express is popular in the same applications as original CompactPCI, and provides higher performance with little or no increase in cost.
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Where does xTCA fit in SDN?
It’s widely known throughout the carrier world that there is an alarming trend in the ARPU, as well as cost per bit. This has driven a significant interest in the carrier world in Software-Defined Networking (SDN), which separates the control and data planes in network switches. At the first day of AdvancedTCA Summit 2012, many of the presentations – and much of the hall talk – was centered around OpenFlow, the preeminent SDN specification, and how it can/may be used in future carrier network architectures.
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Olympian offloading and creating a (profitable) “Games Lane”
Today, the 30th Olympics are scheduled to officially begin, but yesterday Heathrow airport in London experienced its busiest day ever, as athletes, media, and fans flooded the city in anticipation of the 2012 summer games. Eager to witness the physical prowess of the likes of Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt, the gates at Olympic Park are expecting over 9 million tickets worth of traffic. The streets of London are prepared for even greater congestion, as the 16-day event has prompted the creation of a “Games Lane” to ease some of the bottlenecks sure to arise.
John McHale, Editorial Director
Brandon Lewis, Technology Editor
