Upgrade legacy VME & cPCI systems to MicroTCA

Many design engineers are looking to upgrade from their legacy parallel bus systems to a new architecture. Legacy VME and CompactPCI simply do not have the bandwidth and performance for most embedded computing applications. They can still have a niche in specific designs where a bus-based approach is acceptable - less reliability and significantly lower throughput. However, most board vendors are investing their resources in the newer, more powerful architectures.

MicroTCA was developed by the PICMG group, the same organisation that created CompactPCI in the 1990’s (and many of the same companies that created VME in the VITA group), and is a good fit for a wide range of applications because of its high performance-to-size ratio and versatility. The architecture has benefits over other form factors due to its robust system management, inter-processor bandwidth, and high-reliability features. In addition, the open-standard COTS architecture is typically more interoperable and lower cost than competing standards.

MicroTCA has some primary markets that drive the bleeding edge performance and innovation. These are MIL/Aero, communications and high energy particle physics. In the Mil/Aero market, Electronic Warfare (EW) applications drive powerful DAQs, ADCs and DACs. The physics community needs the highest performance digitisers, with more channel options, and various RF boards for low level RF, beam position monitoring and other requirements. In communications applications, the push for faster networking has driven 100G processors and FPGAs. MicroTCA also offers a wealth of high-end storage, graphics, I/O, FPGA and other boards which make the ecosystem rich and diverse. The result is a highly versatile, compact COTS architecture that is well-suited to a wide range of applications.

Read and download the full whitepaper from VadaTech, below.