Pound cake, I am told, has a very simple recipe: one pound of butter, one pound of flour, one pound of eggs, and one pound of sugar.  If you want to make a pound cake, all you need to do is combine these ingredients, bake at the appropriate temperature, and voila! Pound cake! Part of the beauty of this process (besides the easy to remember recipe) is that the ingredients don’t all need to come from specific sources.

Imagine for a moment if this was not the case.  Suppose butter from one dairy worked, but butter from another dairy did not.  Or even worse, butter form one dairy would only work with sugar and flour from specific suppliers, while butter from another dairy only worked with a completely different set. All of a sudden making pound cake just got a lot more difficult.

In a sense, the PICMG 3.1 (AdvancedTCA) technical subcommittee is trying to make 100Gb Ethernet as simple as creating pound cake. Combining boards from one vendor, switches from another, and backplanes from yet another will always result in a working 100Gb system. Those of you who are familiar with high speed design understand this is not an easy thing to do. With signals in excess of 25GHz, every part of the system must be accounted for and there is little margin for error.

Fortunately, PICMG has some of the best high-speed design experts in the world focused on this problem. The work, which began early this year, is progressing steadily and we are on target to compete the spec in the first quarter of 2016. With full multi-vendor interoperability, backward compatibility and 100Gb operation, the newest generation of AdvancedTCA products will let you have your cake and eat it too.

Doug Sandy | Chief Technology Officer

PICMG has just released Engineering Change Notices (ECNs) for the PICMG 3.0 AdvancedTCA Base Specification and the PICMG 3.7 AdvancedTCA Base Extensions Specification.

AdvancedTCA was originally specified to use 32 bit IP addresses according to the IPv4 protocol. IPv4 supports 4 billion distinct IP addresses and in the emerging world of Internet of Everything and billions of interconnected devices, this is not enough. IPv6 uses 128 bit addresses, so more than 3.4 times ten-to-the-thirty-eighth power devices can be directly addressed.

Engineering Change Notices are a method PICMG uses to make permanent, binding changes to a specification without releasing a new revision. Once released, they become part of an existing specification. The IPv6 feature is completely optional and does not affect backwards compatibility in any way. All existing compliant ATCA systems will remain so. New systems can choose to implement this feature or not.

ECN001 for PICMG 3.0 Revision 3.0 may be downloaded here.

ECN001 for PICMG 3.7 Revision 1.0 may be downloaded here.

Chris Ciufo, Editor-in-Chief for embedded content at Extension Media recently interviewed PICMG President Joe Pavlat about the state of ATCA, 100G signaling, software trends and the fundamentally different needs of the Communication Service Providers that serve the telecom market and the Enterprise Service Providers that deliver services to companies like Amazon, Facebook, and Yahoo. Joe explained that the ATCA ecosystem is healthy and that the CSP’s believe that, in the future, only about 10% of their equipment needs can be met with commodity “pizza box” hardware. At the same time, the entire ecosystem of equipment builders is facing downward pressure on pricing as everyone is trying to provide more services to more customers at today’s costs.

Click here for the full interview.