FROM EDN EUROPE: Advanced TCA boards target complex Comms applications
by Graham Prophet -- EDN, February 2, 2006
Adlink's aTCA-6891 is a single-board computer, primarily intended for use in communications applications based on the Advanced TCA platform, that supports Advanced Switching Interconnect. The company says that this introduction represents a significant move towards a high-performance, standards-based method of connecting multiple-processing and I/O elements in a PCI Express switched topology. The board implements an ASI dataplane-fabric interface using PCIe-to-ASI bridges, supporting a dual-star or five-slot full-mesh backplane with four PICMG 3.4 channels, each one of which supplies 10 Gbit/sec bandwidth by combining four PCI Express "lanes" at 2.5 Gbit/sec. The 6891 uses dual low-voltage Xeon processors running at 2.8 GHz, with an 800 MHz system bus. It can support up to 16 Gbytes of DDR2-400 memory.
Adlink supplies a range of board-level products in a variety of formats, especially cPCI, aTCA and their derivatives, the largest sectors served in Europe being communications and test and measurement. The copmpany has recently opened an office in Düsseldorf, Germany to serve its network of European distributors.
The company is also active in smaller-format computer modules, an example being the newly-introduced NuPRO-825 "half-size" single-board computer. This product uses low-power Pentium M or Celeron M processors running at up to, respectively, 2 GHz or 1.3 GHz, and has up to 1 Mbyte of L2 cache. There is provision for 2 Gbytes of DDR 266/333 SDRAM, a DVI graphics interface, USB, Gigabit Ethernet and serial ATA ports, and on-board compact flash. Other small-form-factor board configurations that Adlink supports include ETX and ETXexpress; read more about small-footprint embedded computing modules in the article "Serial streams shrink embedded-system designs" beginning on page 32 of this issue of EDN Europe.
Adlink, www.adlinktech.com.
