Generation 4 of the NAT-MCH supports Gen2 PCIe and Gen2 SRIO

Sankt Augustin, Germany, September, 2010 - N.A.T. the expert in high performance connectivity products for data and communication solutions announces the 4th generation (Gen4) of its MicroTCA Carrier Hub NAT-MCH supporting the second generation (Gen2) of PCIe and SRIO switches.

The NAT-MCH is the central switching resource for any MicroTCA system and dedicated to any application in the communication, aerospace and defence, medical or industrial market. Due to its modular design the NAT-MCH allows customers to build full scalable MicroTCA systems by selecting the required and omitting the non-required features offered by the MicroTCA and AMC standards.

The bandwidth of PCIe and SRIO based MicroTCA systems can be doubled by using NAT-MCH Gen4. It uses the second generation of PCIe (PCIexpress) and SRIO (SerialRapidIO) switch devices, which allow 20 Gb/s data transfer.

The PCIe 2.0 standard doubles the per-lane throughput from the PCIe 1.0 standard's 250 MB/s to 500 MB/s. The NAT-MCH can support 12 AMC slots with 4 lanes.

The SRIO 2.0 standard doubles the throughput per lane to 500 MB/S and extends its physical layer to support 5.0 Gbaud and 6.25 Gbaud lane rates, allowing a 4x RapidIO port to have up to 20 Gb/s of usable bandwidth. The NAT-MCH supports up to 12 AMC slots with 4 lanes and two uplink ports each with 4 lanes to the front panel.

In addition to 1GbE, clocks (telecom and fabric) and fat pipes as PCI Express, SRIO and XAUI (10GbE) the NAT-MCH offers enhanced features as port trunking for 1GbE or fat pipe uplinks (CX4 and SFP+) for SRIO and XAUI or a real USB port or GPS frequencies at the clock mezzanine.

The NAT-MCH Gen4 firmware fully supports redundant environments as well as load sharing with multiple power modules. Enhanced debugging features also include the support of the power safe System Event Log (i.e. for post-mortem analysis). Also available is an improved version of the well-known JAVA based GUI NATview which offers options like Backplane Connectivity Viewer and the FRU Editor for adding or deleting multi-records.

The NAT-MCH is offered with different front plates compliant to MTCA.0, MTCA.1 and MTCA.4 standard.