Molex (Lisle, IL) offers a μTCA backplane and development chassis to allow developers to build and debug μTCA designs before going to production. The backplane has a fully redundant dualstar architecture designed to run at 10 Gbps to facilitate the development of μTCA systems. The dual-star μTCA backplane features Molex μTCA press-fit edge card connectors that are combined with launch geometry, minimizing reflections and enabling 10 Gbps over each differential pair to handle up to four times the bandwidth of a backplane wired to meet XAUI specifications. The backplane also features Micro-Fit 3.0™ 14-pin, blind-mate fan tray connectors to mate to hot-swappable fan trays and ensure complete redundancy. The backplane uses single-wide AMC cards, is 0.42 × 0.012 m in size, and bolts into both the Molex μTCA Development Chassis and the Rittal Development Chassis. The backplane and development chassis can be used for developing applications that use off-the-shelf cards to configure systems for telecommunication applications such as access products, especially FTTX, cellular, and WiMAX base stations; industrial and instrumentation applications; and medical applications.

The backplane has four compact slots, allowing either 10 full-height AMC cards, or four compact and eight full-height payload slots, providing a total of 12 AMC slots. Fabric B on ports 2 and 3 is configured to support SAS or SATA drives in any of the slots, allowing users to connect processor cards directly to storage drives. It also features slots for 2 MCH modules and two power supplies, enabling users to test hand-off features to the alternate MCH or power supply. The backplane has a FRU ROM (Field Replaceable Unit Read Only Memory) that facilitates communication of all backplane characteristics to the MCH.

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Embedded Technology Magazine

This article first appeared in the January, 2007 issue of Embedded Technology Magazine (Vol. 31 No. 1).

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