6U CompactPCI® Parallel/Serial Hybrid Systems

2011-11-26, Christian Ganninger

As was the case for CompactPCI®, the two board sizes 3U and 6U have been defined for CompactPCI® Serial. The 6U board size offers the user attractive options for combining the parallel CompactPCI® bus with the serial CompactPCI® bus with ease in a single system.

In 3U systems there are also two possibilities for this, either using a double-width CPU inserted into a CompactPCI® system slot and with a mezzanine board inserted into the CompactPCI® Serial system slot, or alternatively, by selecting a CompactPCI® PlusIO system slot that can address both CompactPCI® and CompactPCI® Serial peripheral slots. Here, however, the number of serial slots is limited to four.

In the 6U system, CompactPCI® and CompactPCI® Serial can be linked on a 4HP board. Here CompactPCI® Serial is selected such that the serial signals are handled in the upper 3U of the board. The lower 3U can contain the CompactPCI® interface. With a hybrid CompactPCI®/CompactPCI® Serial CPU of this type, up to seven CompactPCI® and eight CompactPCI® Serial peripheral slots can be addressed.

A number of "mixed slots" (boards connected to CompactPCI® and CompactPCI® Serial) are also possible in a single chassis. This allows multiple boards to access the parallel PCI bus and the fast serial protocols simultaneously.

With the appropriate backplane, the flexibility of the CompactPCI® Serial specification allows a wide range of possibilities. Old 6U CompactPCI® or packet switching boards can thus be combined with hybrid CompactPCI®/CompactPCI® Serial boards and pure CompactPCI® Serial boards in the same system. The GbE of packet switching boards can then even be connected directly to the Ethernet of CompactPCI® Serial.

An example of what is now possible would be to expand a packet switching system with a CompactPCI® Serial Raid storage system. The hard disks are accommodated on the CompactPCI® Serial boards, are addressable directly from the processor board via Serial-ATA or SCSI and can be inserted or removed while the system is running. Or a slow 6U I/O board based on CompactPCI® can be connected simply to a fast CompactPCI® Serial system.

With this, the foundations for the high-performance systems of the future are in place.


Figure 1: 6U hybrid system with board and backplane

Christian Ganninger, Global Category Manager Systems EMEA, Schroff® / Pentair Technical Products

German version on ElektronikPraxis: 6HE CompactPCI Parallel-/Serial-Hybridsysteme

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