PICMG

This week, the Mars rover Opportunity celebrated its 12th anniversary on the red planet, having  landed there on Jan. 24, 2004. The rover is still functioning, and has an exploratory mission over the winter in “Marathon Valley” in the Endeavour crater.

Opportunity is controlled by two CompactPCI computers, designed and built by BAE Systems.

When Opportunity first landed, the NASA team thought the harsh Martian environment would render it useless in a matter of months. But the golf cart-sized rover, powered by solar energy, is still collecting data today.

CompactPCI remains a vital and important technology for a wide range of applications, and is widely used in satellites and other space applications. It’s rugged and it works.

Congratulations to the NASA engineers and support teams, and BAE.

Joe Pavlat

PICMG

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.