Designing a system with more than 100 FPGAs in one 14-slot chassis (Figure 3) meant pushing the ATCA 200 W per-slot thermal limits. Mercury worked closely with its chassis partner to achieve more than 200 W per slot. While fewer FPGAs could have been put on the board to avoid cooling challenges, it would have meant additional systems. Early in architecting the solution, Mercury worked closely with the customer to compress five separate chassis to two chassis, thus needing to cool more per slot.

Firm Solutions

Figure 3. ATCA-based Commercial Ground-Based Satellite Beamforming Communications Platform.

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The system has the most advanced platform management software for remote operation, administration, and management of FPGA applications. The goal was to make applications highly available and highly reliable, and improve the serviceability and visibility of field-deployed applications. Carriergrade Linux deployed on processors throughout the system make up the system’s Linux Support Package.

While the system addresses a telecommunications application, Mercury discovered during the development process that the ATCA architecture is suitable for a number of other applications. For example, beamforming for a base station is quite similar to beamforming for a radar system as both involve deploying massive numbers of FPGAs. Mercury is leveraging the ATCA infrastructure to other high-end computing applications and markets.

This article was written by Greg Tiedemann, Director of Business Development and Systems Engineering for Mercury Computer Systems’ Communications Computing Segment in Chelmsford, MA. For more information, contact Mr. Tiedemann at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it , or visit http://info.hotims. com/10964-400.