Sankt Augustin, Germany, September, 2010 - Flexible and high-bandwidth, but also low latency processing AMC boards being required by multiple applications in the medical, industrial automation, aerospace and telecommunication market.

N.A.T. announces the NAMC-8569-CPU: a multi-service CPU board featuring multiple Ethernet, Serial Rapid IO, PCIexpress, USB interfaces and optional TDM connectivity.

The NAMC-8659-CPU is equipped with two processing resources which are the MPC8569 PowerQUICC III CPU and a powerful FPGA from Lattice. This combination offers a low power and high bandwidth PowerPC based computing platform with extension options for adaptation of the particular application needs.

At the front panel this AMC offers two Gigabit-Ethernet interfaces (support for 10/100/1000 Base-T operation), one USB and one RS232 interface and optional user defined IO of a user sub module.

One or both GbE-interfaces can be switched or multiplexed to the backplane. Depending on the required throughput one fat pipe (PCIexpress or Serial Rapid IO) or the combination of two fat pipes (PCIe and SRIO) is available to the backplane.

Therefore the NAMC-8569-CPU does not offer only PCIe or SRIO like other AMC boards, but also the combination of both. This feature targets applications i.e. in industrial automation and medical, where IO boards need PCIe and where the low latency of SRIO for multiprocessing is requested.

For telecommunication application the CPU’s TDM interfaces are connected to the FPGA as well. The FGPA implements several interconnecting blocks on the NAMC-8569-CPU board:

• The FPGA performs the Ethernet multiplexing/switching between the two CPU GMII ports, the two front panel Ethernet interfaces, the two backplane GbE lines and the internal ITDM data.
• It holds a time slot interchanger that can flexibly interconnect TDM data from the piggy-back module, TDM data from the MPC8569 TDM engine and TDM data from the ITDM unit within the FPGA.
• Additionally it holds the ITDM-TDM conversion machine, capable of transporting 2048 bidirectional 64kbit/s channels via ITDM.
• All clocking relevant signals are present at the FPGA to provide maximum flexible clocking structure to the board.

In telecommunication applications either the NAMC-8569-CPU can be used as a general purpose CPU, but also with its ITDM-implementation as CPU processing signalling protocols like MTP2, MTP3, ISUP of boards requesting ITDM support. N.A.T. offers for this market the NAMC-8569-16E1/T1/J1, NAMC-16E1/T1/J1, NAMC-STM1, NAMC-STM4, NAMC-16ADSP, NAMC-EXTender, NAMC-8569-CPU and the NAT-MCH supporting all features of the MicroTCA standard.

Medical, industrial automation and defence applications demand besides processing power and bandwidth also different kind of memory onboard, Watchdog-Timer and custom extension.

For program, configuration and data storage purposes multiple types of memory are accessible on the NAMC-8569-CPU. The CPU can boot its firmware either from NOR Flash (redundant banks), from up to 8 GB onboard NAND Flash chip or from the Micro SD Card slot. Operating memory consists of 1GB 64-bit wide DDR2 SDRAM. A 512kB MRAM chip can be used to permanently store changing data in non-volatile memory.

The Watchdog-Timer in a range of 100μs to 100 s can reset the CPU or the whole AMC board.

Custom extension to the basic functionality can be provided by a sub module connector available on the board. This connector to a piggy-back PCB processes the following signals:

• MPC8569 BDM interface
• FPGA JTAG interface
• IPMI controller programming interface
• Local bus of MPC8569
• TDM interface to FPGA
• General Purpose FPGA signals

Due to the fact that most of the connector signals are routed to the FPGA more flexibility in the design of sub-modules for the NAMC-8569-CPU is available.

For different use compact or mid size front panels compliant with MTCA.0, MTCA.1 and the up coming MTCA.4 standard will be available.

The NAMC-8569-CPU is supporting N.A.T.’s own operating system OK1, Linux and QNX. Following features are filling the gap in:

• Medical: GbE, Serial Rapid IO or PCIexpress and big flash memory
• Telecommunication: GbE and iTDM, Serial Rapid IO
• Industrial Automation: GbE, USB and PCIexpress and sub module
• Aerospace: GbE, combination of PCIexpress and low latency Serial Rapid IO