PICMG

The Embedded World trade show and conference was held February 25-27 in Nuremburg, Germany. Over 850 exhibitors from 35 countries exhibited their products and technologies and more than 26,000 people attended. The show occupied 6 exhibit halls at the Nuremberg Messe. Jessica Isquith, PICMG Marketing VP, and I attended. We spoke about PICMG at a press conference organized my PICMG member MEN Mikro and visited more than 50 PICMG member companies who were exhibiting there.

This show is now the world’s largest, I believe, that is strictly devoted to embedded technologies. There was very little telecom equipment, as most of those suppliers were at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, which was held the same week.

Jess and I were absolutely amazed at how many PICMG compliant products were on display. It is clear that PICMG has become a truly global organization, and just about everyone we talked to knew about PICMG.

Pat Hopper, Publisher and Partner at Open Systems Media, which publishes this journal, said “It was great to see a huge turnout from PICMG members and from the engineering community at Embedded World.  And, with over 1,000 copies of PICMG Systems & Technology magazine distributed from the show floor, it is a great sign that PICMG specifications are being widely adopted and used around the world.”

Two things were especially surprising to me. First, virtually every vendor who builds CompactPCI, which remains very popular, was showing CompactPCI Serial products – boards, chassis, and complete systems. We saw CompactPCI Serial gear in dozens of booths and it is fairly clear that this technology, which was developed largely in Europe, is being adopted more broadly than in the US or Asia. I believe it has become very popular because it builds on a trusted platform, CompactPCI, but is much faster using modern serial interfaces and can be built using regular CompactPCI I/O cards if that is required.

The CompactPCI Serial specification was released in March, 2011 and is being adopted  more quickly than most embedded technologies, which usually take 5 years or so to reach widespread deployment.. The technical committee that developed the specification was headed by Manfred Schmitz of MEN Mikro and that committee is now ready to release Revision 2 of the spec, which will provide more flexibility by incorporating more user defined rear I/O pins and a more flexible way to use Ethernet, which can be used for external communications or to interconnect up to 8 CPUs in the same chassis.

The second thing that struck us was that COM Express seemed to be everywhere. There are dozens and dozens of small form factors in existence, but COM Express seems to be the most popular with the broadest support. That a mature organization like PICMG is managing its evolution, and not just a few companies, was mentioned by quite a few people. Most people we talked to believe the global market for COM Express boards is now in the 2-4 million units per year range. The development of Rugged Com Express, which provides surfaces on all four edges of the board to which a metal clamshell can be clamped, will further open up Com Express to more mil/aero/UAV and rugged industrial and transportation applications.

It is a bit surprising to me to realize that this year PICMG has been operating for 20 years. It has been a lot of fun and I expect that to continue. PICMG has been successful because of the extremely diverse and deep technical skills of its members. It is a fairly “flat” organization that is not controlled by a few high members paying high dues, and that structure has proven to be a good one. We’ve done some truly innovative work, including creating the first open serial fabric architecture, PICMG 2.16. The development of sophisticated platform management, originally done for AdvancedTCA, is now being incorporated into different standards in other organizations. I hope it becomes the norm for any embedded computing standard in the future that calls itself robust.

We’ve got more work to do, including making ATCA better and faster, and developing a complementary high performance platform – dubbed GEN4 – that acknowledges the convergence of telecom central office and data center functions. The High Energy Physics community had embraced TCA and MicroTCA and it is being installed in labs all over the world. CompactPCI Serial, while not very well understood in the beginning, is turning heads and shows how a popular platform can be significantly upgraded without losing its original DNA. Quite a number of PICMG platforms are now being used in mil/aero applications, as vendor independence, lower costs and quicker time-to-market become necessary.

If you are a PICMG member, I want to thank you for your hard work and significant contributions to furthering the goal of open standards for embedded computing. If you are not a member, look around this web site and see of joining us might be right for your organization.

By Joe Pavlat