MicroTCA™: A Good Fit for Industrial Applications

MicroTCA™ (µTCA) was specifically targeted at telecom applications, however designers in other areas have shown interest in the technology, especially in certain industrial settings. µTCA offers many attractive features in a small and flexible form. It has progressed rapidly from concept to functioning hardware, and it has benefited from lessons learned during the deployment of CompactPCI® and AdvancedTCA®. Most importantly, µTCA has abandoned the serial bus in favor of a switched backplane which gives it a major boost in bandwidth.

 

Intro to µTCA

In a MicroTCA system, AdvancedMC™ cards are used as “mini-blades” on their own backplane. The backplane provides connections for the cards using the same connectors as an AdvancedTCA® card. It also provides connections for the switch card and the power module.

µTCA combines the high availability and bandwidth requirements of telecom equipment with significant leeway in how the system can be implemented. This flexibility is particularly evident in regard to levels of redundancy and in the physical packaging of the system itself.

For example, there are many options for the chassis which holds the system cards. These range from “Pico” card cages which can contain just one card, all the way up to large multi-tiered rack mounted systems which can hold 16 carriers/backplanes and 192 modules. Figure 1 shows a few mid-size options for packaging.

 

Figure 1

Thanks to its AdvancedTCA® heritage, µTCA offers a wide array of switched fabric interconnects. These include Gigabit Ethernet, Fibre Channel, PCI Express™, Serial Rapid I/0, StarFabric and InfiniBand® Technology. As new fabric technologies are added to AdvancedTCA®, they most likely will also become available for µTCA.

Available Cards

The most common AdvancedMC™card is the single, full height card (pictured) which offers more board real estate than a PMC card and nearly as much as a 3U CompactPCI® board. Figure 2 shows this relationship quite clearly. Many AdvancedMC™ cards have already been designed and produced for AdvancedTCA®. As a result, there are a wide array of I/O types, general purpose processors, storage, packet processors and specialty cards already for use in µTCA systems.

Figure 2

Industrial Applications

In terms of system performance, µTCA offers two features—high availability and high bandwidth—which should be quite useful for certain types of industrial applications. µTCA may be a game-changer for applications with high availability and high performance needs. These features were inherited from AdvancedTCA and are essential requirements of core telecom networking equipment.

Certain types on manufacturing require an uninterrupted production flow—high speed web printing, semiconductor fabrication, pharmaceuticals—these types of processes take time to start up, and once running cannot be interrupted without a significant loss of time and product. In such situations, the high availability features of µTCA would offer a real value. µTCA, because of its roots in telecom networking, can be designed to avoid a single point of failure, so every element can be made redundant in order to assure high availability and avoid down time.

Added to the redundancy feature is the hot swap feature, which allows a technician to remove and replace individual cards and modules without shutting down the system. Again, for continuous flow manufacturing, this means that the production process can continue to flow, even if there is a failure of an individual component in the control system. µTCA will also report the overall health of the system and send alarms in case of a failure so that technical staff can quickly make repairs.

The second important feature of µTCA—high bandwidth—offers significant advantages for certain other types of industrial applications, in particular, applications that involve sensor and signal processing. A good example of this might be a video inspection system.  Video processing generally requires significant bandwidth in the system, which makes µTCA a very good fit.

The compact size of some µTCA packaging options should be extremely attractive for certain industrial applications where production floor space is at a premium. Again, semiconductor fabrication is an excellent example because every square foot of clean room space comes at a very high price. A control system based on µTCA can pack a terrific amount of processing capability into a very small space, and so “Pico” µTCA will almost certainly merit the attention of system designers.

Conclusions

There is little question that µTCA breaks new ground, if for no other reason than the fact that it has abandoned the serial bus in favor of a switched backplane. It has benefited tremendously from the work done to create the AdvancedTCA® architecture. Because it is based on AdvancedTCA®, a high bandwidth and high availability architecture, it inherits many features which simply are not available in other embedded architectures. It offers flexibility in packaging options which range from “Pico” systems composed of just one or two cards all the way up to large rack mounted arrays. It uses mezzanine modules which are intentionally designed to be low cost, commodity items. It is agonistic to operating systems and to backplane fabrics. In other words, it is a blank slate on which system designers will be able to draw new ideas. And for these reasons, MicroTCA has macro market potential in industrial applications.