In addition, the ATCA Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) infrastructure can be leveraged to accomplish management, upgrades, monitoring system health, and reporting alarms — a significant advantage compared to competing standards, particularly for telecommunications applications. These tasks all can be done speaking the same language, although there are different “dialects” within IPMI that require attention to detail during system integration.

FPGA: Evolving Computing

Figure 2. The Beamformer Conversion Engines (BCE) serve as compute blades for the Beamformer Computational Unit (BCU)

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• 300 Gbps of continuous I/O capacity in each direction. This implies 600 Gbps of intra-system, bidirectional capacity. This translates to 25 Gbps in each direction per FPGA board with 12 boards in each shelf.
• 15 TeraOPS of continuous computing per shelf. The beamforming is accomplished using either 25 SX-55 FPGAs @ 200 MHz or 12 SX55 FPGAs @ 400 MHz.

The ACU comprises 12 Analog Conversion Engines (ACEs) and two host processor modules. Each host processor module is a Gigabit Ethernet-based switch card, and a Pentium M processor and a hard drive that are plugged into AMC sites. The system is hosted from one slot and has a backup from the other. The BCU consists of 12 Beamformer Conversion Engines (BCEs), which serve as compute blades for the BCU, and two host processors. Figure 2 shows a BCE block diagram and how traffic flows in through the rear transition module (RTM) until being routed out to the FX60s.

As shown in Figure 1, connectivity to the satellite and between the ACU and BCU occurs via a fiber-optic rear transition module (FOM). A rear transition connector on the FOM brings the fibers in from the antenna, which is communicating to the satellite. Following conversion from analog to digital in the ACU, traffic reaches the BCU for the actual beamforming.

Each BCE has 10 FPGAs. In the past, customers might have used ASICs, but the advances in FPGA technology have opened the aperture on the possibility of deploying FPGAs for high-end compute demands. An FPGA-based solution aids with time to market and offers the customer the ability to continue to tune applications after the system is deployed.