Q&A

Earlier this year, the Embedded Computing business of Emerson Network Power kicked off the MAGMA (Military, Aerospace, Government, Medical, Automation) initiative to drive adoption of embedded computing solutions into markets beyond telecom where Emerson is an acknowledged leader. CSENews sat down with the leader of the MAGMA initiative team, Paul Virgo, to learn more.

CSEnews: What exactly is MAGMA?

Paul: MAGMA = Military, Aerospace, Government, Medical, Automation. It’s just a short, easy-to-remember acronym for the primary markets outside of the traditional telecom market space. I say “traditional” because communications and telecommunications are not limited to the commercial wireless and wireline business. In fact, it is becoming increasingly difficult to identify applications that don’t need to communicate either for data gathering, processing, reporting or management purposes. For example, the doctrine in the military is to ultimately connect every war-fighter in the theater of operations to provide real-time reconnaissance data, engagement scenarios and battle-readiness.

Similarly in healthcare, diagnostic equipment is moving outward from central hospitals toward rural clinics, shopping malls and even the home, thereby making communication essential. In automation, where machines on the factory floor are sharing data and becoming connected with the front office planning and financial systems, communications are required for end-to-end control of quality and other important processes.

Each of these five areas outside of traditional telecom is a huge market to enter, so our real focus is where embedded computing is an integral
part of a network-centric application.

CSEnews: So it’s a market focus, but which products apply to MAGMA?

Paul: All of our primary product families. We continue to expand our CompactPCI® and VME portfolios as they are well established and very successful in these markets. Both these product families have had recent dual-core processor technology additions. This means a performance boost (or application convergence for existing Paul Virgo talks about the MAGMA Initiative Driving Embedded Computing Solutions into markets beyond telecom applications) and provides an architecture for symmetrical multiprocessing and virtualization for new designs.

The xTCA product lines (AdvancedTCA® and MicroTCA™) are relative newcomers to the market (compared to VME’s 25+ year heritage), but they bring added features to the playing field such as built-in network-centric architecture and robust system platforms. Having said that, let’s not forget that these architectures evolved out of a telecommunications marketplace, driven by vendors and customers in that space. AdvancedTCA has been very successful with 55 percent of network equipment providers already implementing ATCA and another 20 percent evaluating the technology for future use. Applying this to MAGMA markets is simply a matter of recognizing where there are similar server-class applications (airborne command centers, battlefield routers, high-performance medical diagnostic equipment, process batch control for medicine production – to name a few examples).

As a business, we need to make subtle changes to evolve these platforms for MAGMA markets, recognizing the need for differences
in power supply requirements (AC for medical; 28VDC for airborne, as examples) but we do not foresee the need to “ruggedize” basic
AdvancedTCA platforms and there is no activity around this within the governing standards body PICMG® (PCI Industrial Computer Manufacturers Group). MicroTCA on the other hand – with its smaller size, lower weight, and power differentiation to big brother AdvancedTCA – does have ruggedization in its future. As we speak, three different subcommittees within PICMG are looking at progressive levels of specifications for ruggedization. As it currently stands, the Rugged MicroTCA committee(s) will be releasing three specifications and one overall application/alignment guide. The three specifications will cover:

• Air-cooled MicroTCA.1 at extended shock/vibration and temperature for telecom-centric, industrial, and transportation applications
• Air-cooled MicroTCA.2 at more extreme shock/vibration and temperature, including such things as contamination, ESD (Electro-Static Discharge), and two-level maintenance. This effort is focused on more environmentally challenging aerospace and military applications.
• Conduction-cooled MicroTCA.3 applications dealing with shock/vibration and temperature, in addition to such factorsas contamination, ESD and two-level maintenance. This specification focuses on military applications and possibly aggressive telecom applications.

CSEnews: Great insight! Any closing thoughts?

Paul: Our main goal is to provide a broad spectrum of embedded computing solutions in these MAGMA markets. From high performance server-class AdvancedTCA systems to highly ruggedized MicroTCA systems that offer significant size, weight, and power advantages; and to VME and CompactPCI product lines that have been refreshed with current generation processors for I/O centric and rich ecosystems – all of which result in more choices and performance improvements for our customers.