connectivityZONE Products for the week of October 23, 2006
Actel Corporation Says…
FPGA-Based microTCA System Management Solution Replaces Hundreds of Discrete Components, Cuts BOM & Board Area by 50%
Includes free, tested reference designs provide templates for customization
Actel Corporation has announced it is the first silicon provider to embrace the Micro Telecom Computing Architecture (MicroTCA) standard with a comprehensive roadmap of free and tested reference platforms for system management utilizing field-programmable gate array (FPGA) technology. Leveraging the company's single-chip mixed-signal Fusion Programmable System Chip (PSC), these new reference designs include hardware, software and intellectual property (IP) for a complete solution to meet the cost, footprint, flexibility, security and reliability requirements facing today's system designers. Built upon the AdvancedTCA (ATCA) specification, MicroTCA is an emerging global standard driven by the PCI Industrial Computer Manufacturers Group (PICMG)offering adopters lower cost and a smaller form factor, improved reliability and flexibility and reduced time to market. According to industry estimates, the overall MicroTCA market opportunity is $3.5 billion in 2010.
"MicroTCA is poised to capture large shares in markets which need low-cost, high reliability, remotely-managed systems," said Mike Franco, president and CEO of SignalStream Technologies and chairman of the MicroTCA subcommittee. "I am pleased to seeActel's commitment to support the MicroTCA design community with Fusion and comprehensive reference designs. As an early semiconductor entrant, Actel is well positioned to capture a significant share of this promising market."
As a smaller, lower cost option for the marketplace, many believe that MicroTCA has great potential to replace successful standards like CompactPCI and VME as the platform of choice," said Jake Chuang, senior director, application solutions marketing for Actel. "As more telecom OEMs adopt MicroTCA, Actel can help them improve reliability and reduce the costs and board space associated with current MicroTCA and system management implementations using Actel's free Fusion-based reference designs."
Actel's MicroTCA Solutions and Roadmap Actel has identified five reference designs along its roadmap to address the MicroTCA specification -- a power module, an advanced mezzanine card, a cooling module, a MicroTCA carrier hub and a power supply. Actel's first available offerings include the power module and the advanced mezzanine card. Conformant with MicroTCA version 1.0 and the Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) version 2.0, the Fusion-based power module design offers unprecedented integration, resulting in a more than 50 percent reduction in part count, cost, and board space as well as improved manufacturability, flexibility and reliability versus typical power module designs. Actel's advanced mezzanine card design conforms to PICMG AMC.0 ECROO1 RC1.0 and allows designers to integrate payload and management functions.
In 2007, Actel plans to deliver the cooling module, the MicroTCA carrier hub (MCH) and the power supply reference designs. Actel's cooling module will offer temperature and voltage monitoring for fans. Performing shelf and carrier management functions, Actel's MCH will provide integrated baseboard and network management and support the MicroTCA Carrier Management Controller (MCMC) interface. Later in the year, Actel expects to offer the conversion of AC power to 48V DC input via its power supply offering.
EN-Genius Says . . .
Actel's reference design for the management elements of MicroTCA designs is a perfect example of how FPGAs are becoming an indispensable bridge between merchant silicon and high-volume ASICs. By applying their low-cost non-volatile flash FPGA technology to the MicroTCA market, they've been able to offer a cost-effective way to deliver the essential but non-value-add system management functions that are required in every chassis well before the market is mature enough to support the cost of developing an ASIC. Instead of spending your engineering budget and schedule on re-inventing functions to handle configuration, power-up/down sequencing, or fault and chassis management, these customizable, pre-engineered solutions let you check off the appropriate boxes on your project management chart and get on with the real design tasks.
All the reference designs use Actel's Fusion series of low-cost mixed-signal FPGAs to provide both the sense channels and the appropriate logic to support all necessary management protocols running over the I2C channels within the MicroTCA management busses. The designs include both the IP to configure the gate arrays and the software to drive the device's embedded 8051 controller core.
 The first reference design out of the chute supports the high-voltage power module (see Fig. 1). Hard-wired failsafe logic enables it to respond to emergency and alert conditions (such as hot-swap and power-supply failure) in 65 µs (well under the 100 µs specification) without the need for tasking the on-chip 8051 processor. And if you need working hardware for verification or small production runs, you can even buy a complete 384W for evaluation (check with Actel for details). A design to support AMC cards is expected by the end of 2006, with elements to handle carrier MicroTCA carrier hub (MCH) management cards, low-voltage power modules, and cooling modules to be rolled out over the course of 2007.
Because of the cost, power and time-to-market savings they provide, Actel should win lots of business in the high-volume cost-sensitive applications where MicroTCA is expected to thrive (See my earlier editorial There's Room at the Bottom for a little more on MicroTCA applications). While they are the only folks currently delivering an integrated management element, Actel will eventually face competition from non-programmable merchant silicon like National and Renesas, but Actel thinks it will survive the competition because of the mix of digital and analog elements their unique fab process allows them to integrate. Even in this first spin they're able to offer up to 30 on-chip analog sensing channels to feed the device's 12-bit 600 ksample/s ADC using only a handful of passive components.  But even as sales volumes for microATCA products grows, an FPGA-based solution should still make sense because it can absorb other functions and be easily customized to meet the needs of a particular platform using their system management development kit (see Fig. 2). This neat little development board is a complete platform including all the hardware you'll need to for developing your own chassis management solution including an open-source toolkit.
Actel's MicroATCA management solution reference designs for power module and advanced mezzanine card are available now. Pricing for the Fusion PSC family starts below $5.00 each in 250-k piece lots. The System Management Development Kit is available now priced at $895.
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