The Upgrade Game: VME to MTCA and Beyond

Part of our mission is to fully involve the customer in the design and manufacturing process. With the flexibility of in-house manufacturing, we specialize in creating custom solutions for unique applications. We were contacted for a custom project by a U.S. Department of Energy research lab, originally to learn more about our MicroTCA options after senior staff finally admitted VME was too long in the tooth to stay with. After this initial connection, we collaborated with them to create a beam monitoring system that would monitor for system malfunctions and shut down their accelerator in the event of an issue.

For this contract, the customer specified that they required a low latency connection between AMC modules, initially suggesting a crossbar fabric switch. However, the client also needed to go many-to-one, but the latency of an Ethernet switch was out of the question for this project. Our engineers’ solution was to build a new fabric module for our UTC002-V7, putting an FPGA in MCH slot 2 taking ports 8-11 from each AMC module. Faced with some very specific stipulations, VadaTech’s engineering team designed a custom system that addressed the customer’s specific needs, and kept our client involved with the process every step of the way.

If your applications have specific requirements, we’re happy to help: contact us to begin a collaboration.