Technology InContext a proprietary high-speed bus for timecritical data—the RapidIO fabric supports these multiple traffic flows in a deterministic manner.
What Next?
Figure 2
Mercury’s Ensemble2 product line includes control (PowerPC and PowerQUICC) and DSP processors, FPGA-based AMCs, standard carrier blades, a RapidIO switch blade and various sizes of ATCA chassis.
ration management and machine health monitoring capabilities that can prove extremely useful in the large and complex systems typical of semiconductor equipment. Being designed for the high-volume telecomm industry, the standard also supports attractive cost metrics, particularly as adoption accelerates.
Solution
The new compute platform is based on Mercury Computer Systems’ Ensemble2 product line, which includes control (PowerPC and PowerQUICC) and DSP processors, FPGA-based AMCs (Figure 2), standard carrier blades, a RapidIO switch blade and various sizes of ATCA chassis. By using AMC carrier blades with onboard RapidIO switching, the resulting system configuration is a compute
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platform that meets the customer’s deterministic low-latency requirements in a physically small, high-density package. A custom-interface AMC translates between RapidIO and the proprietary protocol used throughout the rest of the system. This uses standard serial RapidIO endpoint IP, implemented in an FPGA, to interface to the rest of the compute platform and existing customer IP in the same FPGA to support the proprietary interface. The system is scalable in both processing and I/O by selecting the appropriate AMCs, while the RapidIO fabric provides the necessary flexibility to enable this to be done without compromising performance. Whereas the old processing system used two buses—a standard bus for control and monitoring alongside
In any industry, value must increase over time. In a processing platform that means either reducing cost or increasing performance, or both. MicroTCA offers an obvious route for cost reduction, reducing the switching and support infrastructure costs for a RapidIO platform. While the equivalent system provides lower bandwidth (being dual star rather than mesh architecture) the target application is not bandwidth-constrained. Since fewer switch “hops” are required to traverse the system, MicroTCA actually offers lower hardware latency, giving a small benefit to this critical system characteristic. Cost reduction is assisted by moving to multicore processors. Application developers must take care to make use of the benefits of such a processor, but in this case middleware—a hardware abstraction layer—was provided to isolate the user from the platform, easing the adoption of new technology. While ATCA was designed for the telecom market, it is a very capable standard that is appropriate for a much broader range of applications. Switched fabrics are replacing bus-based architectures where bandwidth and/or latency are important. By having the fabric firmly embedded at the heart of the standard, ATCA is well placed for such applications. The system management capabilities provided by the IPMI infrastructure add value wherever there is more than a minimal level of complexity. RapidIO, as a lean, low-latency fabric specifically designed for embedded applications, is gaining traction in embedded control, so it is not surprising that RapidIO and ATCA together are adopted in this space. MicroTCA, with its lower infrastructure overhead and lower cost base, will broaden the applicability of such fabric-based control platforms to less demanding and more cost-sensitive applications. Mercury Computer Systems Chelmsford, MA. (978) 256-1300. [www.mc.com].