Bustronic, TreNew Develop AdvancedTCA Backplanes
11/15/2002 - Bustronic, an industry leading designer and manufacturer of high performance backplanes, and sister company Elma TreNew, Europe's renowned high-speed backplane specialists, have co-developed ultra-high performance AdvancedTCA backplanes. Simulation on the first backplane demonstrated speeds of 3.125 Gbps to 5 Gbps and cross-talk less than .2% (near end coupling coefficient) over standard FR-4 board material.
Bustronic and TreNew have unleashed new 14-slot Dual Star and a custom 12-slot Dual-Dual Star AdvancedTCA (ATCA) backplanes based on the draft specifications of PICMG 3.X The standard 14-slot features a 12-layer controlled impedance design with 2 fabric slots located in physical slots 7 and 8. Boards with similar functions can communicate via the Update Channel Interface (UCI). UCI is comprised of 10 differential pairs in a point-to-point connection between certain sets of slots, so that some slots will support double-width boards.
The custom 12-slot Dual-Dual Star backplane features a 26-layer controlled impedance design with 4 Fabric slots and 8 Node Slots. The backplane size is approximately 17"x 17" (accomodating the new 8U form factor cards of ATCA) and is based on a 1.6" spacing (except slots 1 and 7, which are 2.0").
AdvancedTCA has several key features including Gigabyte/Terabyte per second bandwidth across each shelf, 150-200W per board and 3 Kilowatts per chassis power, and accommodates larger (8U x 280mm) boards on a 1.2 mm pitch which allows larger/taller components and more space on each board.
AdvancedTCA (Advanced Telecom Computing Architecture) is an effort of over 125 companies to develop the next generation carrier-grade telecom architecture. The backplanes do not use any PCI or other bus topologies, they are routed with point-to-point interconnections and are fabric-agnostic. The sub-specifications of ATCA include PICMG 3.1 (Ethernet), PICMG 3.2 (Infiniband), and PICMG 3.3 (StarFabric) which are the current fabric implementations of the draft specification.
Bustronic and Elma TreNew share resources to develop a wide range of high-performance backplanes. The companies are the leaders in switched fabric backplane design, having developed the first PICMG 2.16 (Compact Packet Switching), StarFabric, and GigaBridge HA backplanes on the market.
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