ELMA BUSTRONIC DEVELOPS NEW EASYPLUG ADVANCEDTCA BACKPLANES

FREMONT, California, Jan. 5, 2005 - Elma Bustronic Corporation, an industry leading designer and manufacturer of high performance backplanes has developed a fully pluggable AdvancedTCA (ATCA) backplane. The 14-slot Dual Star ATCA backplane offers hot-swappability "everywhere", saving cabling time and money, and reducing mean-time-to-repair (MTTR).

The 7U 14-slot ATCA backplane features a Dual Star topology and redundant plug-removable connectors for fan trays, power entry modules, and shelf managers. This provides the backplane with full redundancy and full hot-swappability for all modules. Compliant to PICMG 3.x specifications, the 14-slot features a 12-layer controlled impedance design with 2 fabric slots located in physical slots 7 and 8. Boards with similar functions can communicate via the Update Channel Interface (UCI). UCI is comprised of 10 differential pairs in a point-to-point connection between certain sets of slots, so that some slots will support double-width boards.

Elma Bustronic's Signal Integrity (SI) lab has performed simulation and backplane characterization to ensure the highest performance. The company's unique ATCA probe card makes accurate and sophisticated measurement possible. AdvancedTCA has several key features including Gigabyte/Terabyte per second bandwidth across each shelf, 150-200W per board and 3 Kilowatts per chassis power, and accommodates larger (8U x 280mm) boards on a 1.2 mm pitch which allows larger/taller components and more space on each board.