Blog

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 is in the process of forming two new technical subcommittees that are intended to improve the performance and add capability to two existing standards.

Space CompactPCI Serial will add the Spacewire interface for external communications and Serial Rapid I/O for high speed, deterministic board-to-board communications. This effort builds on the success of standard CompactPCI in space applications, where it is widely used in satellites and on the International Space Station.

A Call for Participation has just gone out inviting PICMG members to join a new subcommittee that will update and refresh the Com Express specification. The updates include providing for 10 gigabit Ethernet and facilitating the transition from LPC to eSPI.  A new Type 7 pinout will also be defined. Miscellaneous fixes and updates will also be addressed.

For information on either of these projects, contact Joe Pavlat at PICMG:  pa****@pi***.org

Pound cake, I am told, has a very simple recipe: one pound of butter, one pound of flour, one pound of eggs, and one pound of sugar.  If you want to make a pound cake, all you need to do is combine these ingredients, bake at the appropriate temperature, and voila! Pound cake! Part of the beauty of this process (besides the easy to remember recipe) is that the ingredients don’t all need to come from specific sources.

Imagine for a moment if this was not the case.  Suppose butter from one dairy worked, but butter from another dairy did not.  Or even worse, butter form one dairy would only work with sugar and flour from specific suppliers, while butter from another dairy only worked with a completely different set. All of a sudden making pound cake just got a lot more difficult.

In a sense, the PICMG 3.1 (AdvancedTCA) technical subcommittee is trying to make 100Gb Ethernet as simple as creating pound cake. Combining boards from one vendor, switches from another, and backplanes from yet another will always result in a working 100Gb system. Those of you who are familiar with high speed design understand this is not an easy thing to do. With signals in excess of 25GHz, every part of the system must be accounted for and there is little margin for error.

Fortunately, PICMG has some of the best high-speed design experts in the world focused on this problem. The work, which began early this year, is progressing steadily and we are on target to compete the spec in the first quarter of 2016. With full multi-vendor interoperability, backward compatibility and 100Gb operation, the newest generation of AdvancedTCA products will let you have your cake and eat it too.

Doug Sandy | Chief Technology Officer