Design Pack Extension to µTCA® Starter Kit Facilitates Fast and Efficient AMC Design

At Europe's largest embedded developer's event, Advantech will showcase an innovative approach to MMC development with their recently introduced MicroTCA™ Starter Kit, including an AMC hardware and software add-on pack. By integrating the MMC design pack developed by Nuremberg-based GateWare, Advantech has created an easy-to-use, self contained platform for development of applications based on uTCA® and AMC open standards.

At a promotional price of €1999, the MicroTCA™ Starter Kit consists of a 6-slot AC-powered MicroTCA™ chassis with cooling, and includes an Intel® Core™2 Duo processor-based AMC, an SAS/SATA AMC with an 80 GB SATA hard drive, plus a MicroTCA™ Carrier Hub (MCH). The system boots Linuxout of the box and is available from stock, allowing developers to get started right away.

The MMC design pack provides an out of the box IPMI solution for designing next generation AMC modules or simply porting tested and mature board designs from other form factors. The PICMG® AMC standard requires an IPMI management controller (MMC) on each module – usually a new building block not existing on legacy platforms. This easy-to-use and well prepared off-the-shelf MMC solution simplifies development and can be integrated with minimum effort into any AMC design.

The MMC design pack is supplied as a single mid-size AMC card with IPMI firmware, and the software is available as a pre-installed binary with source code. Several licensing models are available. The IPMI firmware has already been used throughout the industry and has passed various interoperability tests to guarantee standards compliance.

At the core of the MMC design pack is a low cost yet powerful NXP LPC2136 32-bit RISC controller with a tiny 10 x 10 mm footprint. The integrated ARM7 CPU runs at up to 60 MHz and provides 256 KB flash and 32 KB RAM memory. More powerful derivatives such as the LPC2138 or LPC2368 can also be integrated on the AMC for applications with more demanding requirements.

“While uTCA® platforms provide a compelling feature set for a lot of applications, customers tend to shy off when it comes to understanding and implementing an IPMI-based MMC just to migrate their specific piece of hardware to the platform. The MMC design pack removes that entry barrier,” said Paul Stevens, Marketing Director at Advantech.

“Getting started on uTCA® has never been so easy,” added Wolfgang Haubner, General Manager of GateWare. “The combination of Advantech's uTCA® Starter Kit and Gateware's MMC design pack shortens evaluation periods from weeks to days.”

For full details and overall conditions of the Starter Kit program, please contact Advantech at [email protected].