Top 6 Engineering Acronyms
Posted by Tracy Valentine
Top 6 Trenton Engineering Acronyms
Engineers love their acronyms. Here is a list of the top 6 acronyms you will hear when walking the halls here at Trenton. There is already plenty of technical info on the internet about each, but below you'll find a very high overview, how Trenton utilizes the technology, and maybe even a brief application story.
1. ISA - Industry Standard Architecture - It may seem like forever ago, but ISA was the interconnect of choice from the early 80s until the mid 90s. Typical examples were sound cards, dial-up modems, video cards, and custom telephony cards. Trenton has many customers that designed their systems around a specific card and they want to continue selling that exact same product for as long as possible. For example, some of Trenton's medical customers spend a lot of time and money getting their equipment approved, and they want to continue selling that product for 10-20 years. Trenton still supports products with the ISA bus, allowing customers to get the most out of their engineering efforts.
2. PCI - Peripheral Component Interconnect - This is where Trenton was really able to differentiate itself. Customers could specify each slot's clock speed (33, 66, 100, 133MHz) and bus width (32 or 64bit). Backplanes could have up to 18 slots with many different configurations (depending on what a customer needed). To this day most Trenton products still ship with PCI slots.
3. PCIe - Peripheral Component Interconnect Express - Most cards designed these days are PCIe. Note that while PCI was a parallel bus topology (meaning 2-4 slots shared a bus and only 1 could communicate at a time), PCIe is point-to-point, which means the connection is not shared and simultaneous bandwidth is huge. Trenton is able to put up to 9 links directly back to the processor board all running simultaneously. We can put even more slots on a backplane by using a PCIe switch.
Slot bandwith is another major advantage of PCIe. Slots can be x1 (0.25GB/s), x4 (1GB/s), x8 (2GB/s), or x16 (4GB/s) in each direction.
Note that there is a newer PCIe Gen 2 that is emerging, but outside of super high end video cards, I haven't seen much on the market yet. I'm sure we'll see more Gen 2 cards coming in the next year or so.
4. PICMG 1.0 - PCI Industrial Computer Manufacturers Group 1.0 - Trenton Technology is the only remaining founding member of PICMG. To this day Trenton still sells many products around this form factor for anything from telecom, military, semiconductor, to medical industries.
Note that the spec's main purpose is detailing how to route PCI and ISA to a backplane. From the backplane the customer has the ultimate flexibility on which slots they want. One really beautiful thing about this form factor is that it allows customers to utilize off the shelf peripheral cards (i.e. video capture cards, Ethernet, etc).
You'll also hear a PICMG 1.0 processor board called a SBC (Single Board Computer). This was a very appropriate name since all of the computer essentials were contained on one board (except the peripheral slots of course).
5. PICMG 1.3 - PCI Industrial Computer Manufacturers Group 1.3 - This is the form factor where Trenton really shines. Not only was Trenton the draft editor, but we also have the widest selection of PICMG 1.3 products in the industry. At first glance the PICMG 1.3 form factor looks identical to the PICMG 1.0. You'll notice that the ISA & PCI going from the processor to the backplane has been replaced by PCIe, USB, Ethernet, and SATA. One beautiful thing about the PICMG 1.3 form factor is that we can use PCIe-to-PCI bridges to get legacy PCI (and yes we can even bridge to ISA slots). This means that customers can mix and match old and new technology giving the ultimate flexibility.
This form factor allows up to 8 links (20 lanes) to go down to the backplane. With the use of a Trenton IO3B1 board a customer can actually get one more link (4 lanes) down to the backplane as well. To say it another way, imagine 9 slots are running simultaneously directly back to the chipset. We need another blog to detail how these links can be configured, but let's just say that this form factor has a ton of flexibility.
You'll also hear a PICMG 1.3 processor board called a SHB - System Host Board. Since the processor board now has optional USB, Ethernet and SATA going to the backplane, Trenton thought SHB was more fitting.Trenton is planning to support PCIe Gen 2 with the PICMG 1.3.
6. PrAMC - Processor Advanced Mezzanine Card - The μTCA (Micro Telecom Computing Architecture) form factor was originally spun off from the ATCA (Advanced Telecom Computing Architecture) form factor (you have to love all the acronyms). Nowadays μTCA is becoming more and more popular with military, telecom, and many other customers who need good compute power in a small form factor. Applications range from small appliances to large 6U high applications. Customers have the option of doing power management, system management, hot swap peripherals, vPro, etc. I'm excited about the potential that this form factor has and what options it opens up to customers.
This contribution is from Michael Bowling, Director of Operations.