Mezzanine Buses

There are a great many Mezzanine buses, some more out-dated than others. Mezzanine cards are small form factor boards that reside as a daughter card on a VME or cPCI mother-board to name a few interfaces. Mezzanine cards to not directly interface to the main system backplane as does VME for example. Most of the Mezzanine interface on this site are represented by two separate pages; one page carries the particular board manufacturers and another page covers the description of the electrical interface and mechanical form factor.

The oldest of the current Mezzanine board formats on the market is the IP Card or Industry Pack I/O Modules. Basically a non-intelligent board format used in a number of systems, a bit dated at this point in time, but there are still Companies Producing IP Modules. Page views are almost down to zero for this board format, which seems odd as it was an I/O based module.

The M-Module which is just as old still receives a few page views, but there doesn't appear to be much support in Producing M-Module Cards.

The mezzanine board format that replaced the IP board was the PMC format, or PCI Mezzanine Card. The PMC board added a controller but still allowed for any required I/O, previously handled by the IP card. So there are still many Companies Producing PMC Boards. A variant of the PMC interface is the PMC-X format. Both of these board standards used the PCI bus as the electrical interface, so really they are somewhat out dated [PCI Card Manufacturers].

The follow-on to the PMC standard was the PPMC interface, or Processor PMC format. There are a few companies that Produce PPMC Boards which were true processor based cards, on a PCI bus. Another related was board format is the PTMC Interface, or Telcom PMC standard [still using the PCI electrical interface].

These are all open standards so the board specifications could be used on any carrier card, but some interfaces were designed specifically for the VME bus, others for the cPCI Interface, and still others for the AdvancedTCA Interface. The AMC Mezzanine card was designed to interface to the new ATCA standard, being relatively new there is a small but growing number of Companies Producing AMC Boards.

Additional mezzanine boards include FMC,  and XMC standards.

New COTS Board Format

Ruggedized Enhanced Design Implementation [REDI]:

A new VME card format is out for release aimed at the new VPX and VXS VME card standards [EURO Card]. The new REDI standard adds much more than just a mechanical standard defined in the IEEE-1101 mechanical standard. The new REDI specification changes much from the old IEEE1101 spec and now tries to handle water cooled devices as well; in addition, to air cooled and conduction cooled boards.

What garbed my eye was the new card formats, really the same 3U/6U sizes, would now handle up to 500 watts. What? how big is my power supply now. The largest power supply I could purchase was 750 watts, now I have to provide 500 watts per slot. The only REDI backplane I've seen appears to be four slots or 2000 watts. How much does a 2000W power supply weigh, I assume it's a switching power supply.

Very few companies are producing VPX boards or VXS boards which are both still new card specifications. In addition, to date, both the VPX cards and VXS cards seems to comply with the older IEEE1101 standard and not the new VITA48 standard [which is yet to be released?].

Note: To make this blog post add a new web page, and add it to the sitemap I had to cut a corner. The two new pages that cover REDI or IEEE1101 listings are copies of another page, with additional notes ~ they are not ready to be released yet. But, no one should be able to find them other than from this blog listing. Also my main computer has begun malfunctioning, forcing me to my backup system.

I'll fix this post over the week end and expand to the posting via comments. The new pages will also be updated this week end, and will link the VPX description to the REDI page and the VME description to the IEEE1101 specification page.

Related links: Equipment Chassis Manufacturers.

New Page Additions

I've been adding some new pages over the last few weeks;

http://www.interfacebus.com/HTX_Daughter_Card_Manufacturers.html

http://www.interfacebus.com/COTS_VPX_Board_Manufacturers.html

http://www.interfacebus.com/COTS_VXS_Board_Manufacturers.html

http://www.interfacebus.com/Test_Equipment_Thermal_Imagers_Manufacturers.html

http://www.interfacebus.com/GPS_Receiver_Manufacturers.html


http://www.interfacebus.com/WebCam_Manufacturers.html

VME Bus

The VME interface still seems to be in high demand. There are a number of pages which deal with the VME bus, and the manufacturers which produce components and equipment on http://www.interfacebus.com/.

The main page that deal with the topic is the VME Bus page. Additional pages include Board manufacturers, Chassis manufacturers, Backplane manufacturers, and a number of pages providing Connector Pinouts.