13
April 2015
M
ICRO
TCA
If an AMC board, fan, or PSU were to start
to reach non-critical or critical limits, the
MicroTCA carrier hub (MCH) in the sys-
tem could divert power and other resources
to other parts of the system, which is built for
redundancy and failover.
A remote message can be automatically sent
to a control station for servicing. It is possible
in a MicroTCA system to have 99.99999%%
uptime. With the rear I/O requirement, a
MTCA.4 system ( gure 1) is an excellent t.
e 8U version could provide 12 slots with rear
I/O with full redundancy. e 2U MTCA.4
chassis platform can hold up to 6 slots with rear
I/O. e systems in this example utilized a 40
GbE MCH for fast communication to a proces-
sor and 4-port GbE module for network com-
munications. With the modular versatility of
MicroTCA, the same chassis architecture was
used in both applications, with some variations
of the modules needed. With full system man-
agement and failover functions, the system can
ensure 99.99999% uptime.
Video processing requirements range from
rugged airborne applications to broadcast
markets for video compression/media trans-
port. Rear I/O is attractive for some systems
for convenient I/O to other devices. Live
broadcast requires heavy video processing,
post-processing and bu ering. So, there are
a range of FPGAs and processor AMCs from
Intel based x86 quad cores to Freescale, Tilera,
etc. e ability to edit on the y and in the
eld from live streams and not take up much
space in a rack is critical. As many boards in
the system don’t require rear I/O, utilizing a
hybrid MTCA.0 and MTCA.4 chassis can be
very e ective. In this 2U example, there are 4
MTCA.0 slots and 4 MTCA.4 slots with rear
I/O. ose familiar with MicroTCA know of
the typical rackmount products for commu-
nications systems. Less known are ruggedized
versions for outdoor use. A ruggedized 6-slot
½ ATR ( gure 2) per the MicroTCA.3 stan-
dard is being used for an edge-of-network
device placed on street lamps.
Of course in the Mil/Aero market is where the
MicroTCA shines with its superior SWaP-C.
For radar signal processing applications, high
speed digitizers can be utilized on the AMC
with an FPGA carrier with an FMC mezza-
nine for the A/D and D/A. Figure 3a shows
a Virtex-7 FPGA carrier with an on-board
QorIQ P2040 PowerPC (PPC). It is advanta-
geous to provide a host processor so that each
board in the system can act independently.
Further, several of the distributed processing
functions can be handled via the PPC, allow-
ing the FPGA board to work more e ciently.
Figure 3b is an FMC at 4.0 GSPS at 12-bit
ADC and 5.85 GSPS (in mix mode) at 14-bit
DAC. Depending on the number of signals
that need to go across the FMC, it sometimes
is required to have the two married in one
board due to pin-out limitations. us, you
can have dual ADC or dual DAC and a Vir-
tex-7 FPGA on one AMC. Providing plenty of
memory for bu ering is essential in many sig-
nal processing applications. erefore, several
banks of an e cient SRAM memory can be
provided, such as QDR-II.
High speed signal processing is also a require-
ment in high-energy physics applications. In
these systems, usually several channels are
required from multiple inputs for the con-
trol systems and DAQ in the experiments.
MicroTCA has become the architecture of
choice for these applications, utilizing the
MTCA.4 speci cation with rear I/O. e com-
pact size, light weight, and low cost (compared
to other high-performance architectures such
as AdvancedTCA) are also advantages. As
precision timing is essential, the multiple
clocking lanes in MicroTCA are addition-
ally important. Utilizing the double-module
card size which includes the RTM connector,
AMC boards mating from the front and rear
can o er a several channels, MSPS speeds at
o en 12- to 16-bit rates, and clock/trigger I/O.
Figure 4 shows the block diagramof aMTCA.4
AMC and its mating RTM. For ease of cabling,
the majority of the I/O channels are on the rear
board, with 12 ADC at 125 MSPS. e front
AMC example holds dual 250 MSPS DAC and,
in this case, a Kintex-7 FPGA with a clock and
jitter cleaner. O en, physics applications only
need one or two slots. To save space and costs,
1U MTCA.4 chassis platforms o er an advan-
tage. e MCH and a mid-range Ivy-Bridge
or Atom processor (usually heavy processors
are not required) can be incorporated into the
chassis so that slots are not sacri ced for these
inherent functions.
Figure 3. AMCs with a carrier for an FMC
per VITA 57, o er a powerful combination of
FGPA and multi-GSPS ADC/DACin a 75mm
tall x 180mm deep x 20.32mm pitch module.
Figure 4. A MicroTCA.4 front AMC and rear
transition module.
