MicroTCA Standard Products & Solutions Guide

Officially launched by PICMG in 2006 and derived from ATCA, the MTCA standard (MicroTCA or µTCA) is part of a MOSA approach (Modular Open Systems Approach). It was designed to transcend the limitations of outdated industrial standards, such as VME or PCI, by offering greater modularity, flexibility and scalability.

MTCA is based on the AMC card format (AdvancedTCA Mezzanine Cards) in order to meet performance and innovation needs. Today, the MTCA standard adapts to a wide variety of markets: science, industry and telecommunications, as well as vision, quantum technology and defense.

Key strengths

Modularity and scalability

Independent, flexible, and easy to add, replace or adapt without changing the architecture and configuration, the modules allow redundancy and hot-swapping.

Performance

Thanks to its open and multi-protocol interfaces, capable of reaching 40 Gbps per link on the backplane, MTCA enables flexible data transfers between modules, meeting the strict real-time requirements of computing and data acquisition.

Reliability

For critical systems, the standard incorporates complete redundancy (management, power supply, cooling, signals, clocks, data) to ensure continuous service and near 100% availability.

Intelligent clock management

To minimize external connections or for applications requiring high precision, the backplane offers dedicated signals for clock distribution and synchronization via triggers.

Remote control and management

All active elements are interconnected via IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface) to an MCH (MTCA Carrier Hub) card which controls the system and manages its resources and main signals, and which provides a software interface for remote monitoring and management.

Compactness and granularity

The chassis can be compact (1U or 2U) for a few AMC cards, with a seamless evolution to much larger chassis that can accommodate up to 12 double-width, full-height cards.

Interoperability

MTCA is an open standard, supported by many industrial players, ensuring electrical and mechanical compatibility between infrastructure and payload modules, according to the MTCA.0 standard and its variants.

Short Time to Market

The MOSA architecture enables rapid system composition and scaling, from simple to high-performance, using diverse COTS modules or custom AMC cards designed for project-specific needs.

Useful concepts for understanding MTCA

MTCA adopts the core principles of the ATCA standard in a more compact format, offering a finer level of granularity around the AMC modules (ATCA mezzanine cards), which have become the main boards of MTCA. Thus, all the intelligence and advanced functions for resource management and control, clock distribution, high-speed flexible interconnects, security, etc., that constitute the full richness of ATCA, are condensed into a chassis control board (shelf manager) called MCH card (MTCA Carrier Hub). It manages AMC cards as if they were on an ATCA card and provides them with all the required mechanisms, resources and functionalities.

By extension, all the other elements that make up an MTCA system (the mechanical chassis, the backplane, the cooling modules, the power supplies and of course the MCH card) reproduce an ideal, reliable, high-performance and perfectly controlled environment for AMC cards, in continuity with what an ATCA chassis would provide them.

However, several major innovations emerged with the standardization of MTCA, which has evolved independently to become a fully-fledged architecture that is positioned as the replacement for the VME and cPCI standards. MTCA has indeed addressed some of the limitations of these older standards while incorporating feedback and market trends to become the industry standard of the future, much like VPX for the military, which operates on very similar principles.

Important

The AMC cards that represent the payload of the MTCA systems are defined by their width and their size/height, when laid flat on a table. The length of AMC cards is fixed at 181.5 mm.

Here are some useful acronyms:

• CS: Compact size
• MS: Mid-Size
• FS: Full Size
• DW: Double width
• SW: Single Width
• RTM: MTCA Rear Transition Modules are modules that extend the interfaces and functionalities of AMC cards to the rear of the chassis, in certain variants of the MTCA standard (known as MTCA.4).