Thanks to its close family ties to AdvancedTCA®, MicroTCA was endowed with robust management capabilities right from the start. These capabilities include temperature and voltage monitoring, FRU insertion and removal, and Electronic Keying. MicroTCA adds certain options for management that AdvancedTCA does not offer, which should be exciting news for anyone designing MicroTCA systems. Dedicated system configuration storage on the shelf, direct cooling and power module management are examples of these features.

The AdvancedTCA®, AdvancedMCTM and MicroTCATM specifications are built around serial interconnect technologies such as PCI ExpressTM, Ethernet, SATA, SAS, InfiniBand® Technology and Serial Rapid IO. Even though Ethernet is ubiquitous and well known, there are a number of design parameters that affect device interoperability in the ecosystem. SGMII and SerDes interfaces are very similar; consequently, are very easy to misuse. Ethernet Autonegotiation and manual link configuration settings also play a crucial role in establishing a valid link between two Ethernet devices for application data exchange. Gene Juknevicius, Technologist GE Fanuc Embedded Systems