PICMG xTCA Standards Extensions for Physics: New Developments & Future Plans

Abstract

After several years of planning and workshop meetings, a decision was reached in late 2008 to organize PICMG xTCA for Physics Technical Subcommittees to extend the ATCA and MTCA telecom standards for enhanced system performance, availability and interoperability for physics controls and applications hardware and software. Since formation in May-June 2009, the Hardware Technical Subcommittee has developed a number of ATCA, ARTM, AMC, MTCA and RTM extensions to be completed in mid-to-late 2010. The Software Technical Subcommittee is developing guidelines to promote interoperability of modules designed by industry and laboratories, in particular focusing on middleware and generic application interfaces such as Standard Process Model, Standard Device Model and Standard Hardware API. The paper describes the prototype design work completed by the lab-industry partners to date, the timeline for hardware releases to PICMG for approval, and the status of the software guidelines roadmap. The paper also briefly summarizes the program of the 4th xTCA for Physics Workshop immediately preceding the RT2010 Conference. he case for developing ATCA and MicroTCA (xTCA) specification extensions for physics has been covered in several previous papers. Briefly, ATCA and MicroTCA is the first all-serial communication platform available to the physics community to support both massively complex accelerator controls and massively large, high bandwidth and throughput experimental data acquisition systems. The major strength of xTCA is its multi-layer highly scalable managed platform architecture designed to achieve the highest possible system availability. Physics research imaging technologies have driven industrial applications in a wide range of medical scanners, for example, and in turn continue to evolve to exponentially higher speeds and resolution through new computer, communications industry and analog-to-digital conversion chip developments. The high availability managed platform is an important new tool for the instrumentation and control systems of these most complex scientific machines and instruments ever invented. Adaptation of the xTCA platforms to physics was undertaken by a collaboration starting in May-June 2009 with the PICMG open specifications industry consortium. The remainder of this paper discusses the results of lab-industry committee work as well as important concomitant prototype developments among participating laboratories and industries.