By: dl

I suffered a bit of nostalgia a few months ago when one embedded computing company rolled out a big bunch of products, some of which looked very familiar. I realized they were familiar to me because they were continuations of board families, but board families from companies that had disappeared as independent entities many years ago. These companies had, of course, been acquired. It was great to see the different legacies being pursued and a diversity of customers served over the long haul.

It’s now spring, and a whiff of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) is in the air. Sources are saying that the current line-up of embedded computing companies may look quite different later this year, particularly in the mil/aero segment. Some big embedded computing companies might expand or contract their empires, some medium size companies might get gobbled up, and a dark horse just might ride in from outside the embedded world.

Several of the larger embedded computing companies are themselves the product of acquisitions in an earlier age. The Embedded Computing group of Curtiss-Wright Controls , for instance, was stitched together from Vmetro, Synergy Microsystems, DY-4, Vista Controls, Pentland and Peritek, plus a couple of verticals. For its part, GE Intelligent Platforms (formerly GE Fanuc) was built up from Computer Dynamics, VMIC, Radstone and others, including SBS. That company had itself taken a stab at empire building in an earlier era, bringing Greenspring, Logical Design Group, Bit 3, VI Computer, OR Computer and others under the SBS umbrella.

Elsewhere, empires have been built by Kontron, with its acquisition of PEP Modular Computers, Thales Computer, Teknor, Jumptec,  Matrix, Intel’s rackmount server operation and others; and by Emerson Network Systems, which gobbled up Motorola’s embedded computer group, Force Computers, Heurikon, Blue Wave Systems, Mizar, Prolog and others. Some of the empires have worked out very well, and some have not.

What’s behind the next M&A wave? The pundits will certainly come up with their reasons, but perhaps it’s all just anxiety driven. Waves come in and waves go out, while companies shrink and grow when they’re afraid that they’re too big or too small to survive, that they’re not sufficiently diversified or have stretched themselves too thin, etc., or they can see from their market numbers that they’ve clearly bet on the wrong horse.

Is a new board vendor shuffle a good thing for the marketplace? Yes and no. We’ll have to wait and see how good the acquirers are at empire building.

By: lw

Casual attendees at the January Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas may have been surprised to see an FPGA mezzanine card (FMC) on display in the consumer TV pavilion, courtesy of Xilinx Inc.’s Targeted Design Platform. VITA hoped for great things with VITA 57 FMC, but consumer products weren’t necessarily high on the agenda. If FMC could move beyond automotive, military, and factory-floor roots and into the digital den, the economies of scale would be significant.

In theory, a modular card in a retail product might represent a greater advantage than it already shows in mil/aero and industrial markets. Interfaces requiring programmable logic for implementation, such as High Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) or DisplayPort, could be implemented on the FMC. At the very least, the OEM could swap out cards to differentiate product lines before moving into the distribution chain. Ideally, the FMC could be exchanged by the retail dealer or perhaps the end customer.

To some extent, this is precisely what Xilinx had in mind. When it introduced the Targeted Design Platform (TDP) concept in early 2009, the theory went far beyond evaluation boards for vertical markets. The Xilinx TDPs included middleware, soft IP cores and license rights, development and debugging software, and sample application software. When Xilinx partnered with Tokyo Electron Device Inc. for the digital TV market, the FMC-based TDP was meant to make customization easy and cheap. Harry Raftopoulos, director of consumer segment marketing at Xilinx, said that the smaller budgets and tighter schedules experienced by consumer-product OEMs in the post-2008 economy mandated that they could not spend months studying LVDS, HDMI, and DisplayPort interfaces. Hence, the arrival of FMC allowed strapped vendors to accelerate the design cycle.

But before we get too excited about VITA 57 gaining a market dwarfing any other, let’s realize that Xilinx and TED are wonderful drum majors for this parade – but they’re missing the multitudes of followers behind them. The FMC standard still must overcome public perceptions regarding previous mezzanine standards such as PMC and XMC (VITA 42). Sure, the earlier mezzanines did have and continue to have devout adherents, but the use of the cards hasn’t radicalized product delivery methods moving all the way out to the end user. There is an analogy here to the evolution of fiber optic interfaces on networking boards. New Multi-Source Agreement modules like SFP, XFP. and SFP+ certainly are much easier to use than a 300-pin optical module. But no MSA form factor has achieved the ubiquity of an RJ-11 or RJ-45 Ethernet jack.

Think of the years of development efforts that have gone into turning USB from an interface for printers and peripherals to a veritable fashion accessory when integrated in a memory stick or a communications device. A USB stick played a starring role in the movie Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, and USBs now represent an alternative way of releasing a music album, next to LPs and CDs and digital files. The proponents of HDMI or DisplayPort interfaces would like to see their own interfaces become USB equivalents, but the FMC advocates insist that it’s easier to make the mezzanine module a universal “great equalizer.”

Let’s look at what has happened in networking and enterprise IT markets. PMC and XMC have gained popularity as a means of increasing Ethernet, Fibre Channel or T1/T3 port density on network equipment, but the message regarding ease of use has only migrated as far as the OEM. Network distributors and system integrators do not stock PMC or XMC cards the way they would stock PCI Express NICs, for example. PIMG was hoping that the overall standards for ATCA and MicroTCA would drag the AMC mezzanine in their wake, but these standards have not been widely adopted. Truth be told, the networking and telecom equipment markets are not healthy enough these days, in terms of numbers of OEMs, to support common backplanes and subsystem interfaces.

For mil/aero and industrial control markets, there are solid reasons to consider OpenVPX, and solid reasons to adopt mezzanine board form factors that emphasize reprogrammability. In consumer worlds, such efforts have to fit with an end-user “plug and play” perception, and must be driven beyond the tier of OEM to have staying power. The VPX Marketing Alliance, working on its own, can’t promote FMC, but neither can a single vendor alliance like Xilinx/TED. The Xilinx demonstration represents a good preview as to what is possible if FMC is used in consumer devices. Now, the trick is to get the IEEE, the trade associations for HDMI and DisplayPort, and similar coalitions behind this effort. FMC needs a cheering section of thousands to gain the traction it deserves.

By: ra

Just when you thought we were done creating “bus specifications” for all the serial fabrics, two more initiatives show-up on our radar here at OAR. Actually, these are not “buses” as we have defined them in the past. They are, instead, glorified wiring harness specifications for connecting subsystem components into a system architecture: in one case for satellites; in another for airplanes.

Some of the connections in these specifications, such as power feeds to the LRU (line replaceable units), are likely to be multidropped like a classic bus. The data connections, however, will almost certainly be point-to-point. The systems management and monitoring connections could be either multidropped or point-to-point. It’s unclear as yet whether the external connections to these subsystems will be proprietary or open, but the internal connections will probably be proprietary.

One of the exciting efforts on this front is a satellite plug-and-play bus being developed and funded by the U.S. Air Force with the goal of creating COTS-based satellite components that can be put together in days and launched at a very low cost.  (See  Northrop Grumman to Design Air Force Plug-and-Play Spacecraft Bus  and Air Force extends plug-and-play spacecraft. ) As might be expected, NASA has also been deeply involved in this effort, and Northrop Grumman recently received a contract to further its development.

The objective of this project is to create a basic satellite platform–with all the power, data, control, and monitoring lines defined and wired-up–so that small mission-specific LRU’s can be designed and easily plugged together. This would reduce the time-to-launch of a new satellite down to days or weeks. Data connections for the LRUs, which consist of electronics in a standardized, enclosed metal can (similar to VITA’s V-58 LRU specification), will be accomplished with a TCP/IP compliant router. NASA seems to have plans for launching many “nanosats,” small satellites weighing between 11 and 110 pounds, in communications and networking apps in space. 

What’s the motivation here? you might ask. Consider this scenario. Back in 2007, China shot-down one of its failed satellites, proving that the Chinese can take-out intelligence satellites and, thus, render the military of an opponent blind by shutting off critical communications networks. In 2008, the U.S. Navy shot-down an errant U.S. satellite, proving that we can take out an opponent’s satellites, too.  

Given this scenario, the rationale behind this new standardized satellite bus may be as follows. That the only way for us to counter an opponent’s threat to our intelligence and communications satellites is to put more of them up there faster and cheaper than the other country can build missiles to take them down. If the cost of the missile to shoot down a satellite is higher than the cost of the standardized COTS-based electronics package in the satellite itself, that makes a star wars race a bad business deal for any opponent. 

Another new bus is being developed by the U.S. Navy in conjunction with Honeywell: an avionics bus for cockpit instruments in military aircraft. (See Insider: Honeywell proceeding with caution and U.S. Navy avionics systems integrators embrace open architectures to combat parts obsolescence .) It’s designed to allow easy insertion of new technologies in military aircraft avionics systems to reduce the tremendous obsolescence problems endured by the military for decades. Avionics sales have suffered terribly in this recession, and a new standardized avionics bus may be the key to increased sales in the future. As with the satellite bus discussed above, the new avionics bus is LRU based. It’s expected that once proven in military aircraft, it will rapidly migrate to commercial aircraft.

The avionics bus concept has, of course, been around for decades. Way back when, King made a lot of function boxes (AirNav, Transponders, Artificial Horizons, compass, GPS, Direction Finders, weather radar, COMM, digital displays, etc.) which it interconnected with a proprietary avionics bus. King merged with Bendix, Bendix merged with Allied Signal, and Allied Signal merged with Honeywell. 

Remember when GE announced their purchase of Honeywell back in 2000 ? The US FTC approved the merger, but the EU nixed it, saying it would give GE a monopoly in the avionics market. Some very large companies have their eye on this market, and a new standardized avionics bus that mitigates those pesky obsolescence problems might be the elixir that increases sales and opportunities in the depressed aerospace market. 

Despite the ascendance of open-architecture buses in recent decades, I have some concern that the new avionics bus and satellite bus may be proprietary. Hopefully, depressed market conditions for aircraft and avionics components have changed the old proprietary thinking, and these will truly be open standards. The fact that both rely on enclosed LRU boxes, however, suggests that the interfaces inside the box are not standardized, although the boxes may communicate over an instrument panel bus that will be standardized and open. We’ll have to wait and see.

By: dl

The new members of Intel’s Core i7 microprocessor family  introduced at this month’s Consumer Electronics Show have created quite a stir in the embedded computing community. In his blog, John Keller, editor-in-chief of Military & Aerospace Electronics magazine, suggests that there “may be a tectonic shift” under way that would displace PowerPCs with i7s. 

“While Intel sees the floating point capability of its Core i7 processor as the gateway to a new generation of complex graphics and fast streaming video,” Keller writes, “military systems designers see it as the latest and greatest way to implement signal processing for advanced radar, sonar, electronic warfare, and electro-optical applications with commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) single-board computers.” 

He notes that Curtiss-Wright Controls Embedded Computing, GE Intelligent Platforms, and Extreme Engineering Solutions Inc. all announced i7-based SBCs “within hours of Intel’s introduction.” I’m not quite sure of the exact timing, but Concurrent Technologies, Kontron and Emerson Network Power also bellied up to the i7 bar in short order, and others are sure to follow. 

The SBC makers’ praise of the new Intel entry is enthusiastic, indeed, perhaps even a bit over the top. GE Intelligent Platforms, for example, claims “remarkable performance” for its i7-based boards. “The increased integration and increased density of this new family of processors from Intel offers us astonishing new opportunities,” said Peter Cavill, GM for military and aerospace products at the company. 

And, according to Dirk Finstel, CTO of Kontron AG, that company’s i7 entry represents “the ultimate computing tool MAG HPEC users have been waiting for, allowing them to finally walk away from 10 years of PowerPC Altivec dominance in radar, sonar and imaging applications.” 

Indeed, Freescale and the PowerPC architecture may have become vulnerable in high-end signal processing applications that hear the clarion cry of Intel’s Streaming SIMD Extensions. And Freescale may have lost some of its fans by leaving Altivec out of its newest CPU core (See End of Altivec PowerPC digital signal processing chip spells headache for Serial RapidIO designers), while in some signal processing arenas, PowerPCs have been replaced by designs based on FPGAs.  

On the other hand, old timers in the arena recall Intel’s on-again, off-again love affair with the embedded world, with buses such as Multibus II that went from prince to frog in short order, microprocessors such as the i960 that quickly went from star to red-headed stepchild within a decade and other such items. Is Intel in it for the long haul this time? 

Who knows. But in the meantime, let the i7 games begin!

By: ra

The demise of backplane-based computing systems has long been predicted, but the horizon is now coming into view. For the past decade or more, we have seen one embedded board segment after another drop backplane-based computer systems and move to interconnected motherboards, small form factor boards or little computing boxes. The industrial segment, using CAN, Profibus and Ethernet, quit using backplane-based systems long ago. That initiated the demise of STD, ISA, EISA and PCI backplanes. CompactPCI (cPCI) came on the scene about the time the shift away from backplanes occurred and was never heavily used in industrial applications.

The medical industry (MRI, CATscan, PETscan, CT, etc.) moved away from backplane-based VME and cPCI systems a few years ago, migrating to motherboard-based boxes interconnected with high-speed serial interconnects. Many medical apps have only a few control requirements (e.g., moving a beam into position), and image reconstruction is easily done with a commercial motherboard of some kind. These systems have no real time, shock, vibration or extended temperature requirements, so they can use cheap commercial 1U motherboard boxes interconnected with some networking technology like Ethernet.

That leaves two remaining markets for backplane-based systems: telecom and military. Telecom has been procrastinating about going to interconnected and stacked black boxes for years. They still have the old POTS mentality that favors backplane-based switch gear and have not made the mental or financial transition to a pure IP (Internet Protocol) communications system.

That change must happen in the next few years, so telecom may be the next segment to abandon backplane-based systems and go to large stacks of interconnected 1U boxes, especially as the telecom industry becomes more and more commoditized. The only remaining concern for them to resolve is how to maintain those systems: i.e, how to easily remove and replace the boxes in the rack.

That leaves us with military systems as potentially the last computing segment to rely on backplanes to carry their primary interconnect. But that, too, will change. Real-world requirements mean that the military will ultimately also move away from backplanes and go to stacked “boxes” known as LRU’s (line replaceable units), which are defined in the VITA-58 specification.

Today the military spends millions of dollars training soldiers to repair and maintain their sophisticated electronic systems. These people typically leave the military and take that extensive (and expensive) training to the civilian world after a single tour. A technician may be in a military training school for over a year, and then it takes about six months for them to become proficient in the field. They work at their job for a year or two, and then leave the service.

The upshot is that the military must use regular soldiers to maintain and repair systems in the field by simply swapping out LRU’s, while only career soldiers doing depot maintenance get computer training. Telecoms are seeing the same scenario: they spend millions on training and education and then lose those employees to other firms.

The primary people who repair and maintain systems on the battlefield must be the soldiers who operate those platforms in battle. They will simply pull-out failed LRU’s and slide-in replacements. The non-functioning box goes back to a depot where trained technicians will replace failed components and put the “box” back into the replacement LRU supply chain.

This suite of military requirements will drive computers to LRU’s.

o A critical military system must be repaired and battle-ready in 30 minutes or less.

o The people who maintain and repair that system must require no more than 10 minutes of training.

o No tools must be required to repair the system and make it battle-ready in 30 minutes or less.

o No unit can weigh more than 37 pounds for a two-man (or woman) lift.

Of course, the military has too many legacy platforms to make this change quickly. There are too many ATR boxes in aircraft, too many VME chassis in weapons platforms and helicopters, etc. Moreover, the serial interconnect technologies to connect those LRU’s (various fabrics and Ethernet) are too unstable. That is to say, their transmission frequencies keep going up, their electrical signaling protocols are changing from 8B/10B to PAM, their associated semiconductor chips have an 18- to 24-month life cycle, etc. Just looking at the number of refreshes to existing VME backplane-based systems says it will be decades before we can make the switch to LRU-based MIL systems, although a few are now going to deployment.

Down the road, the incentive to abandon backplane-based systems and even copper interconnects will grown even greater. As we move to 10G links and, as a consequence, adopt optical interconnects, the era will favor 6-foot, 19-inch racks of commercial boxes and ATR boxes of LRU’s woven together with 10G optical connections.

Ultimately, the highest costs of computing equipment in telecom and MIL applications are the life-cycle costs: installing, maintaining and keeping that gear functioning. Doing that requires highly trained, intelligent and expensive people at the repair depot. The only way out of the present cost trap is to use LRU’s as stackable boxes for the field, maintained by regular soldiers or employees.

Are we finally seeing the demise of copper backplanes? Yes. We have seen it occur in industrial and medical apps already. Telecom is next. And when 10G optical connections are inexpensive and stable, MIL apps will drop backplanes, too. But it will take the MIL segment a decade or more to make the shift. Until then, the MIL segment will be the only remaining market for copper backplane-based embedded computing systems.

By: lw

It’s no surprise that in early December VITA took a critical role in tying together the loose ends from the ad hoc OpenVPX Marketing Group to create the VPX Marketing Alliance, contributing a new acronymn to the annals of embedded computing: VMA. This organization takes responsibility not only for VPX and OpenVPX, but for VPX REDI as well, plus any coming extensions to the family of standards. The near-term extensions will include optical and RF communications.

Two quotes from Sun Microsystems founder Scott McNealy come to mind here – the first on the necessity of uniting standards efforts behind a “single arrowhead,” the second on the need to temper committee enthusiasm over any paper standard it develops with the realization that “Standard equals volume shipped.”

By relying on the historical headstart VME had over the PCI-based server world, VMA can lean heavily on the concept of a single arrowhead. If only ATCA could rely on the historical work of PCI-SIG in a similar fashion, there might be a better story to tell, but there are one, two, many PCI’s. PCI does not equal PCI Express does not equal ATCA/MicroTCA, thus denying the SIG the benefit of that single arrowhead.

But that arrowhead advantage can be lost as OpenVPX enters new worlds. As VMA seeks to expand beyond backplane-module-chassis into broader definitions of interconnect in optical and wireless worlds, it would behoove the organization to remember that unified support of a suite of standards often represents merely the baseline of driving success. If we look at the history of communication alliances, marketing forums in the past decade often had to shift gears in sudden and unexpected ways:

• Optical Internetworking Forum, as a creature born of carriers in a long-haul transport environment, never intended to create physical-layer standards for optical interfaces operating at the physical layer, particularly in the enterprise and server-cluster realm. It certainly never intended to absorb and take on the work of the Network Processing Forum. But as NPF crashed and burned as designers decided to look to other options than an NPU, suddenly the OIF looked like the logical place to hammer out physical standards for microprocessors interfacing with short-reach optics. Who’d a thunk it?

• DSL Forum touting Digital Subscriber Line, and ATM Forum touting Asynchronous Transfer Mode, would not have considered their fortunes identical ten years ago, and would not have seen a reason to subsume their fates under a common header. And IP/MPLS Forum certainly approached broadband applications from an orthogonal direction to both groups, in particular as a direct competitor to ATM Forum. Yet somehow, they all seemed to coalesce into the Broadband Forum, despite the best intentions of marketing wars.

• Trusted Computing Group began life as an embedded processor and module alliance specializing in the tamper-proof component known as the Trusted Platform Module. But the lack of an effective organization promoting higher-layer IT security prodded TCG into expanding into such unexpected realms as secure storage, secure mobile phones, and distributed network access control.

Does this imply that VMA will one day absorb or seek peace with the RapidIO Trade Association, or even the PCI-SIG? Not necessarily, but such a marriage of convenience cannot be ruled out. The lesson to be learned from OIF, TCG and Broadband Forum is that the physical pinout and form factor, even the Layer 2 and 3 protocol details, do not matter nearly as much as bringing together engineering and programming groups who are exploring the same application space, looking for common methods that work across media types. Given that VITA wants to aid in the implementation of ANSI standards, it should look to the example of ITU-T study groups, such as SG 11 (covering signaling methods) and SG 15 (covering optical transport standards on lower layers). The study groups are seen as neutral realms where developers from IEEE and ANSI can sit down and break bread.

VMA need not overtly extend a peace pipe to any particular group like RTA or PCI-SIG. Rather, it should drive the hell out of VPX standards, while keeping an open mind about bringing others into the tents of common backplanes, high-speed serial and parallel communication options, as well as unique form factors to serve future embedded markets. The necessary elements of the equation are the McNealy Factors of common arrowhead and volumes shipped. The sufficient elements of a larger VMA involve being open to new members and new ideas, while being flexible enough to rapidly morph or expand its entire raison d’être.

By: lw

Our fearless leader Ray Alderman already has weighed in illustriously on reasons to fear the Intel-Wind River merger. On Nov. 11, Cavium Networks announced its acquisition of MontaVista Software, an event the open-source community might see as just as frightening, albeit at smaller levels. Now, the MontaVista brand has just as great a chance of standing as a separate entity as the Wind River brand (Good? Next to nil?), so the acquisition itself is not a cause for alarm. It’s just that M&A deals like these show that many corporations still do not grasp the necessary elements that must be preserved for open systems to work on both hardware and software levels.

Don’t get us wrong. When a large vertically integrated software house like Microsoft, Google or EMC-VMWare (maybe even Red Hat, I suppose) acquires a small software developer to add a missing module to a framework, the larger company is simply expanding its portfolio and playing the big-fish-eating-little-fish game. When a hardware OEM snaps up a company making a new type of product or a software house developing products unique for the hardware, a rational expansion has occurred.

But when a semiconductor specialist or OEM picks up an RTOS, development tool, firmware or communication-protocol company that develops products for several hardware binary interfaces, the acquiring company is playing a market elimination game. And when this involves companies who develop for Linux or open-source worlds, the problem is magnified.

Sometimes, an open-source company’s own strategy to monetize can doom an open product.  NextHop Technologies Inc., for example, commercialized the popular GateD routing software from the University of Michigan.  Large OEMs like Huawei ended up licensing GateD.  But when open-source routing failed to be profitable, NextHop focused on 802.11 Wi-Fi software and ended up being acquired by the relatively unkn0wn wireless network company U4EA Technologies.  We still haven’t learned what happened to all that open-source route code!

We have seen the Intel and Cavium strategies before, to be sure. Intel itself picked up Trillium Digital Systems at the end of the 1990s to corner a communication protocol market. Broadcom snapped up the popular LVL7 Systems software company, and NetPlane Systems was traded (batted around, actually) among Conexant, Mindspeed and Motorola Computer Systems for years. In all cases, the acquisition removed the effectiveness and breadth of the underlying software.

No, we’re not about to call for laws that limit the ability of companies to acquire players that offer software for several hardware binaries. That’s capitalism. But it’s important to point out that a true commitment to open systems means, at the very least, not trying to corner a market for a software company that works in several binary architectures. In general, keeping software truly open requires allowing as much software independence in the ISV community as possible.

By: ra

For the past twenty years, we have been only three years away from optical backplanes and architectures taking over the computing industry. And for those twenty years, it never happened. Like the perpetuation of Moore’s Law, the signal engineers made Megahertz and Gigahertz signals run effectively on copper wires and copper connectors. But, as Moore’s Law nears the end of its ability to double the number on transistors in a given space on a die, copper may be nearing the end of its ability to reliably pass signals at higher frequencies.

It’s finally time we dropped copper connections and moved to optics. Why? Well, it just gets too hard to make copper work reliably at 10G and above, and it’s too expensive too. How do I know this? Because, the first two generations of PCI Express used 8b/10b signaling (at 2.5 GHz and 5 GHz respectively). In Gen-3 silicon, they moved to PAM (Pulse Amplitude Modulation) and 8 GHz so they could move the same amount of data as a 10G connection that used 8b/10b, but not have to deal with the 10G signal integrity problems. If you look back at the high-speed connection work over the years, you will see that every time the frequency of the signal doubled, the distance that signal could reliably travel was cut in half. The parallel PCI interface enhancements over time prove this point. So, all the advancement in backplane and cable signal frequencies over the years came at the cost of shorter and shorter runs. “Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?”

Another reason we have refrained from optical connections has been the limitations of the optical architectures. Optics do not like to be multidropped (like a bus). They do not like to be switched (like the old POTS telephone network). Optics like to run from one point to another, without any interference. Market acceptance of the high-speed serial fabrics (and the dying-off of the bus-thinker engineers) have removed that impediment. A number of the fabric-based machines are built with Meshes, which are point-to-point serial connections to and from each board in the rack. Pretty soon, the copper-thinker engineers will die-off, and we can make a wholesale move to optical.

Speed and signal integrity are not the only reasons to move to optical connections. Noise immunity is a “raison primaire” for going optical. Data can be moved in any electrically-noisy environment at GHz speeds without any concern for the ever-shrinking signal-to-noise ratio. In the Military applications, optical connections are immune to EMP (Electro Magnetic Pulse) from nuclear explosions or “pulse bombs”. But in those situations, you must use glass fiber: plastic fiber will undergo a crystalline change, turn opaque, and no longer pass light when exposed to EMP. Optical connections are lighter and more resilient to shock and vibration than copper connections. That is why we are seeing them used frequently in UGV (Unmanned Ground Vehicles) and avionics platforms (including Unmanned Aerial Vehicles and fighter planes). Anywhere weight is a factor, you find optical connections.

Many of VITA’s members have been marketing some optical connections over the years, under product names like “reflective memory”. The Holy Grail for optical connections, until now, was 10 Gigahertz Ethernet. But, Apple and Intel just announced a new optical concept, called “Light Peak”. LP also runs at 10 GHz, and is targeted to replace all the different cables now found in PCs, servers, and other computing devices (techresearch.intel.com/articles/None/1813.htm).

In the VITA Standards Organization we already have two efforts (VITA-66 and VITA-67) that are adding optical connections on VPX backplanes and XMC mezzanine cards with the existing copper connectors. Obviously, we need to sort-out the connector schemes and architectural implications for pure-optical VPX backplane systems. I think it is time we started moving to optical connections rapidly, especially in MIL/Aero and ground vehicle applications that use VPX.

We can’t wait for telecom to drive the optical revolution: telecoms are having trouble controlling their own bowel movements these days, and cannot drive anything except their journey to bankruptcy. So, it’s up to the Military applications segment to initiate this move away from copper and to a new generation of pure-optical architectures and technologies. And it’s up to VITA and its members to lead the way.

By: lw

For board-level form factors and large IP cores, this is the best of times for FPGAs in open systems. But it is also a time of over-hype and under-delivery, particularly in the oft-promised realm of reconfigurability. Elements on the mezzanine are in place, not only in the realm of the very popular VITA 57 ANSI standard, but also in the less-certain Advanced Mezzanine Card realms of ATCA and MicroTCA. The month of October witnessed the addition of 32-bit MIPS cores to the Altera Corp. family, plus ARM and AMBA cores for Xilinx. But what is the end product of all those elements?

If we were to rely on the marketing history of board-level programmability over the last decade or two, we might believe that the long-promised era of “reconfigurability” has arrived. From the earliest days of SRAM-based FPGA cells in the late 1980s, reliance on complex high-end programmable logic was touted as eventually bringing us to the day when hardware would be characterized on boot-up. In essence, a configuration image stored in SRAM or flash memory would allow a device to take on a different identity at each reboot.

In 1990, Lattice Semiconductor Corp assured us that “in-system programmability” was right around the corner. A decade later, startups like Silicon Spice and Improv Systems promised us that the new generation of “ASIP” (Application-Specific Instruction Processors) would change our lives within months. Since then, the battlefield has been littered with the bones of Improv, Silicon Spice, Quicksilver, Adaptive Systems and Chameleon Systems. Isn’t this all beginning to sound like the mainstreaming of gallium arsenide process technology?

Now that FPGAs have met and exceeded many ASICs in gate count and complexity, and the arrival of FMC/AMC has simplified interfaces to board-level systems, a number of existing companies and new startups have used that “reconfigurability” marketing term again. There’s only one problem: system-level designers seem unusually reticent to actually use the programming tools that might buy them that advantage. As a result, some board-level startups in this field have tested the water, looked at some specific vertical markets and re-spun their “reconfigurable” architectures for a single vertical configurable application.  A good example emerged this week, as Stone Ridge Technology re-spun its RDX-11 for specific applications in gene sequencing.

Kevin Morris of FPGA and Structured ASIC Journal sees the same result from the addition of MIPS and ARM cores to FPGA architectures. In an Oct. 27 essay, Morris made comparisons to similar announcements Altera and Xilinx made ten years ago and said he expected few practical results to emerge from the licensees. In essence, popular RISC cores are added to portfolios for marketing reasons, but real FPGA users require a lot more hand-holding, and many more tools surrounding the cores.

Morris may have overstated the case, in that Xilinx’s licensing of ARM’s AMBA interconnect technology would suggest some on-chip communication value similar to HyperTransport or RapidIO. But his overall point is well taken and resembles the problem we’re seeing in the endless promises of reconfigurability. Yes, there may be OEMs who want a “soft base station,” a “soft handset,” or a “soft electronic warfare platform.” But if we look carefully at the issue of mezzanine FPGA interfaces, large IP cores in an FPGA block and reconfigurable memory structures, we come back to the same notion seen in the flash vs. EEPROM debates of yore. Many people talk about “true” reprogrammability or reconfigurability. When it comes down to designing configuration images or paying for devices, however, they end up opting for a special device that is configured once and then forgotten.

Will it always be so? Maybe this time, we are standing on the threshold of the reconfigurable era. Maybe this time, users will ask for ARM cores in their FPGAs, use FPGAs in an FMC form factor and demand true reconfigurability on reboot. But to get there, OEMs will have to offer goof-proof programming tools that use object-oriented methodologies, XML programming interfaces and Wizard-like graphic tools for dummies. Morris has pointed to a real problem, and that problem is similar to one we will find in FMC/AMC cards employing FPGAs. It’s a problem that can only be solved by stopping the over-promising in the industry, giving users simple tools and letting them discover the benefits of reconfigurability for themselves.