Elma presents MicroTCA carrier hub with fibre-optic technology: Maximum transmission speed for MicroTCA.4

Elma presents MicroTCA carrier hub with fibre-optic technology

Pforzheim / Aix-en-Provence – The MicroTCA-specialist Elma Electronic presents his new MicroTCA carrier hub (MCH) with extremely fast signal transmission. The card equipped with fibre-optic technology enables connection to PCs at a distance of up to 150 meters. This enables relocation of computing power and the related heat development. The new MCH was officially launched at the specialist conference TWEPP-2014 in Aix-en-Provence, France.

The CPU of a MicroTCA.4-crate may only be of 4 TE width what often causes problems especially with cooling. The Elma-MCH with four tongues now solves this problem by transferring data from the MicroTCA.4-crate via fibre-optic connection to a conventional PC. Further computing performance and cooling can be realized much easier. The card also offers precise FPGA-based synchronization clock networks as well as synchronization protocols such as WhiteRabbit or IEEE 1588 (PTP) for data transmission.

Head of the Elma research and development department Aksel Saltuklar is convinced by the advantages of the carrier hub: “the new Elma-MCH with option to connect the PC-card via fibre-optic technology offers three decisive advantages to the MicroTCA.4-system: its timing function makes an additional timing board redundant. And with the 16-lane PCIe fibre uplink powerful AMCs such as for example the CPU can be outsourced. Moreover, the Elma-MCH offers the possibility of daisy chaining to connect several MCHs.”