AdvancedTCA Backplane Part II

Last April's newsletter presented an overview of PICMG's latest effort, the PICMG 3.0 Advanced TCA Specification. It has been voted on by the subcommittee members and is in negative ballot review. It is expected the specification will go to the Executive Committee for approval at the Bus & Board Conference in January. Now that the specification is completed it is a good time to look at the mechanical aspects of the backplane in some depth.

The backplane is approximately 5U tall to allow for the rear transistion module interface. If the rear transition module interface is added to the backplane it is 8U tall. The slot pitch is 1.2" so a 14 slot backplane will fit in a 19" rack.

The backplane is broken up into zones. Zone 1 contains the power connector. Zone 2 is made up of the signal connectors carrying the base interface, clocks, update channel interface and the fabric interface. The base interface uses an Ethernet Dual Star topology. Sub-specifications PICMG 3.1 (Ethernet), 3.2 (Infiniband), 3.3 (StarFabric), and 3.4 (PCI Express) determine the fabric used over the fabric interface. Zone 3 is the rear transition module area. The power connector was specially designed by Positronic Industries for the PICMG 3.0 application. It is a 34-pin press fit connector, with two redundant 48V DC feeds. Signals on the power connector are tip and ring, redundant ringing generators, hardware address bits and redundant IPMB busses. The signal connectors in Zone 2 are ZD connectors manufactured by ERNI and Tyco. Horizontally the columns have 5 differential pairs and vertically there are 10 rows. The ZD connector is specifically designed for high speed differential signaling, and is capable of speeds up to 5 Gbps.(-more-)
VITA News
At the last face-to-face VSO meeting, the VITA 34 working group was treated to a detailed presentation by Parker-Hannifin on drip-less liquid connectors. The group is interested in liquid connectors for spray cooling applications. The VITA 41 working group polished up some pinouts on the switched fabric slots. The plan set forward at the meeting was to have the second task group ballot begin on December 20th.

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

New Products

AdvancedTCA Backplanes

Bustronic and sister company Elma TreNew, Europe's renowned high-speed backplane specialists, have co-developed ultra-high performance AdvancedTCA backplanes. The new 14-slot Dual Star and a custom 12-slot Dual-Dual Star AdvancedTCA (ATCA) backplanes were based on the draft specifications of PICMG 3.X.

StarFabric Adapter Cards
StarFabric Adapter Cards convert the PCI bus to StarFabric links, acting as PCI-to-StarFabric bridges. Standard CompactPCI cards can be plugged into the StarFabric Adapter Card, which in turn, is plugged into a PICMG 2.17 compliant backplane. The adapter card takes the cPCIbus traffic, serializes it, and sends it across the backplane in two 2.5 Gbps StarFabric links.

2-slot VME64x Backplane

The BustronicVME64x backplane line now includes a 2-slot version, offering a range of 2-21 slots.

New PICMG 2.16 Backplane for Computer Telephony

This addition to the PICMG 2.16 Packet Switching family features 8 slots. There are two fabric slots for HA redundancy and 6 node slots with provisions for the cPCIbus and H.110 Computer Telephony bus.

 
 

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